Cary Roberts made some modifications to this guitar pedal and then let me try try it out. He gave me a photocopy of the original settings and told me that he modified most if not all of the sounds. There were a few settings I liked but one in particular made this amazing noise when I wasn't playing anything at all. I really enjoy gear that acts on its own.
I became so enamored with this particular setting that I decided to try nearly every instrument in the house through the pedal.
The first three tracks feature the Reverberator and its distinct "aliens rise from beneath the blanketed ground" sound. It is the very fuzzy sound that swells and then covers an entire frequency range throughout and links up the tracks. As you can see from the picture, the Reverberator has a wah-wah style pedal. Move the pedal all the way down and there is noise and a smidgeon of guitar signal. Move the pedal all the way forward and it creates more noise and lets more of the original signal through.
I started out playing the bass on "Designer Ecology" through the Reverberator. Then the guitar on "Happiness is the desired result". Actually, many guitar tracks on both of those songs. Then I got a little crazed and tried to make the Nord Lead 2 keyboard make sounds like the pedal for "Lack there of". Once my little triumvirate of noise was complete I managed to stay away from the pedal for a few weeks. It makes another appearance later on in the CD but in the end I resisted the temptation to smother every track with it. While it would have lent a unifying tonality to the album it probably would have also driven some folks to distraction.
I wrote a bit about worrying if the record would be cohesive sonically and then deleted it. This part is about the recording process and not "let's read an internal dialog that should have stayed internal debating the success or failure of the author's intent for their recording".
The real secret weapon is support. When I played some tracks for friends they gave positive feedback which is priceless when you are working on your own. Working solo can be a long haul. Usually in a band setting you have to coordinate recording sessions and generally things get done on some sort of time table. Alone you have no one to please but yourself. Having someone tell me that what I had produced thus far was not hateful was a big boost. Granted, I don't always believe what I'm told and certainly not for very long but, it is nice to hear all the same.
Next time we move to the production of the CD.