Not Bad For a Girl: the beat goes on! Katie Marie gets experimental with her funky beats

By Katie Marie, on Thursday, September 9, 2010

After regaling you last week with tales of strange mystic folk from Plymouth, this week I thought I’d share with you the fun I’ve been having in my lovely little studio.

Last week I met up with Chris Woods who is a guitarist friend of mine and we were having lots of fun jamming various ideas ‘n’ stuff. I armed myself with a cajon and also thought I’d try mixing a cajon sound with a stomp box to see how it would work… and I have to say the results were superb! Thus far I’ve only used my Logarhythm when playing my acoustic guitar, but used sparsely with the cajon it really added so much to the groove.

The night after our jam I had dreams about all sorts of weird and wonderful things (all clean I’m afraid). Most of which I can’t really remember, but what I do remember was dreaming about creating some really funky beats using two Logarhythms and I’d plugged in various guitar FX pedals to each one to create a totally different kind of tone. So when I woke up I promised myself I’d give it a try, just for fun, and here’s what happened

Katie Marie

I dragged out all the various guitar pedals I’d collected over the years and set about seeing what worked and what didn’t. Eventually I ended up with my DOD Envolope Filter which gave the best results by a mile. It made my Logarhythm sound really synthy and depending on how hard I stomped it depended on how deep a tone I got, yay!

So I got Karon (my cajon) all micked up and set up one Logarhythm plugged into an Envolope filter and the other clean.

I micked up Karon with 3 mics, my trusty AKG D-112 just outside the soundhole along with an SM57 just behind that. I also put a Rode NT1a up front which you’ll hear also picks up my tapping the right Logarhythm!

So here’s a MP3 of a jam I had earlier. This was all done live using Karon and my two Logarhythms, see what ya think

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Other than messing around with Logs n FX, I’m also in the process of recording two cover songs for a radio station. One is my infamous acoustic version of Jump by Kriss Kross and the other is Pokerface by Lady Gaga, will let you know how I get on next week.

On the gig side of things, I’m looking forward to playing at the Bay Horse in Totnes this evening with local singer/songwriter Nicky Swann. It’s all part of the Totnes Festival so it’ll hopefully be a busy one. Tomorrow night I’ll be armed with Martha my Musicman bass as I lay down oodles of tasty riffs for jazz/funk trio Miquid Licks. We’ll be at the Barbican Jazz Cafe in Plymouth and then finally I’ll be playing at the Awliscombe Inn with Nicky. Looking forward to it.

One more thing I did want to share with you was this photo I took when walking out from my studio this morning, I swear that cloud it doing a V sign….