Tenor Saxophone by Dougal Caston

My brother Anthony Caston is visiting from the UK with his wife Sheena, daughter Lucy and son Dougal. At just sixteen years old, Dougal is an accomplished jazz saxophonist who has already had the opportunity to perform and audition with several well know jazz musicians.

He hopes to attend the London Royal Academy of Music or Trinity College of Music in about eighteen months. Dougal sat in with my group Keston and Westdal at the Kitty Cat Klub in Minneapolis last Wednesday, and last Saturday we spent nearly seven hours jamming in my studio. Here’s a short phrase of his playing that I recorded with my AKG c4000b.

Shown at right is my nephew Dougal giving my nephew Tony an early saxophone lesson in my dining room in Minneapolis.

Dougal on Tenor Sax

 

Time Correction Overload 2

ACB reader, Matt, suggested I try the time correction technique in the last post in a different order. Previously I had dropped the pitch two octaves and then brought it back up two with the time correction enabled. This time I did the opposite, starting by increasing the pitch then lowering it to its original position. It definitely has a different sound. I think it’s much closer to the original than the previous example, but still an interesting way to manipulate the clip.

Time Correction Overload 2

Time Correction Overload

Today during my audio production class I was demonstrating to my students how time correction impacts digital audio when pitch shifting more than a few semitones. To illustrate this I pitched down a chunk of music an octave with the time correction on in Pro Tools. The degradation was clear, but it occurred to me that it would be even more obvious if I shifted it back up to the original pitch with time correction enabled again.

This created an interesting way to effectively down-sample the audio. Intrigued, I applied the same technique over several times to hear what would happen on multiple passes. This is something I’m likely to explore more, but I tried it again on the snippet of music from Unprocessed Rhodes Pedal Noise going down two octaves and back up again. It sounds like the audio has been boiled in a pot of bathroom chemicals. Delicious!

Time Correction Overload

Octave Pedal Bass Harmonics


I don’t really have much to explain about this recording. I was trying to get some dirty warbled sounds by playing my bass through an octave pedal. This is an example of harmonics using just the single lower octave setting. The result is a really fun nasally percussive sound. Perhaps this could be the catalyst for a new Keston and Westdal piece.

Octave Pedal Bass Harmonics