Together with her sister Ursula and her friend Gabi I had spent the whole evening beside her bed and held her hand. Then I went to the couch for a break and softly began to pick on my black Stratocaster. After a while I went back, sat on her bed and told her a couple of times that I loved her. The moment of farewell was magical and holy, the tear a symbol of love and total reconciliation.

Only later I realized that the last theme I had played to her came from my album “Triple E” and was called “Voyage sans Retour“, the journey without return. Isn’t our whole life a journey without return?

www.stellaworld.com

Stella Wassermann, picture from the back of her album "L'Ame de la Lune"

It was a great gig! We were playing like in trance and dancers were dancing like mad, shouting and screaming. See the video of the track called “Spaced Out Again”, performed by Stella (vocals, Kaossilator), PJ (VG-99 guitar, vocoder) and Pierre-Alain (drums). The live video parts were shot by Cedric Spindler, the rest of the video is what we project at our gigs.

POWERSOURCE was flown in from Israel for an exclusive gig at the GOASYS event and played his classic Goa Trance – very nice. Our friend Cedric Spindler presented his Bioluminiscense live-act and then DJ Anoebis from Belgian Suntrip Records performed a powerful DJ set. It was a fantastic night!

GOASYS 2010 Flyer

By the way: the enchanting GOASYS decoration was done by Kernspalter, Hexentanz and Psycastle.

Now with the internet there are new possibilities for artists but above all the music gets stolen on rapidshare, megaUpload and all these sites that make money from so called filesharing by selling premium accounts to kids who want to exchange mostly copyrighted files fast.

People think they are entitled to steal the music because they feel they take it from the big companies who are gangsters anyway. This judgment is correct but they fail to notice that they rob the musician of his income while they think they take it from the companies.

As the theft of music seemingly can’t be stopped musicians go along and give away their work for free on Youtube in the hope of getting some promotion and some gigs. If you’re well known some people will pay for your music on iTunes. It’s a strange new world and full of chances for those with open eyes and clever ideas…

Roland_VG_99

The VG-99 by Roland has a basic concept that’s completely different from most other guitar processors: it uses a so-called hex pickup that takes a separate signal of each string. There’s a big advantage with this concept as you can apply compression or distortion for each string separately. This allows for playing heavily distorted chords without the typical muddiness you would get from an ordinary processor. But you need a “Roland Ready” guitar or at least the GK-3 pickup that can be mounted on most guiatrs.

The VG-99 has a lot to offer in synthetic sounds, for instance it contains the famous GR-300 guitar synthesizer in digital form, a very nice emulation that goes far beyond the original. There’s a lot more of other synthetic models and they all work with the hex model – that means for instance that each string has its own envelope that can be used to control filter cutoff. In the VG-99 there’s not only a plethora of amp models but you can also choose from a wide variety of different guitar models, for instance a Fender Telecaster, a Gibson Les Paul, an Acoustic, a Steel or a Sitar and all the models can be extensively tweaked. Different tunings can easily be accessed.

Axe_FX_Ultra

The Axe-FX by Fractal Audio on the other hand uses the normal pickups and just one cable as usual. But it has one big big advantage: it sounds really fantastic! In my opinion sonically it’s clearly superior to the VG-99. The amp emulations are incredible and allow for dynamic playing like with real tube amps. On top of that you get additional effects in the quality range of Eventide and Lexicon. Most parameters can be assigned to a pedal, an LFO or whatever so you can really freak out if you’re into sound design. If not you can just enjoy playing. Although I’m basically a tweaker I often find myself just playing the Axe-FX because it’s so much fun. You also get quite some nice synthetic sounds which I need to explore more into depth but you have the disadvantage that in most cases you can only play one string at once as the Axe-FX doesn’t use a hex pickup. This is especially clear when you use the synth module, a nice sounding and well playable guitar synth with ADSR and LFOs, that breaks down as soon as you play more than one string at a time.

In terms of handling I prefer the VG-99. It comes as a lightweight plastic box that can easily be mounted on a stage stand (it can also easily be hurt by scratches). It has a large display and lots of knobs and switches that make editing really easy even without the practical editor software that comes along. It is very well integrated with the FC 300 pedal board, you just plug it in, make some assignments and have two pedals going and some footswitches.

The Axe-Fx is a sturdy 19 inch metal box. Its editing is quite old fashioned with its small display and a lot of scrolling through menus and sub menus. There’s no easy way of plugging in a pedal board and have it going within minutes or at least I haven’t found it yet. The editor software looks great but is still in its beta stage and people in forums complain about lost sounds.

So this is my summary:
• The VG-99 is really handy for traveling. It’s extremely versatile and has a good sound although I don’t like the effects so much – Roland just doesn’t get flanging in my opinion and the delays have no ducking.
• The Axe-FX has THE SOUND, it has to be heard and played to be believed! But if you travel by plane it’s clumsy and a bit heavy. It doesn’t easily integrate with a foot pedal board.

So as long as I don’t have roadies to carry my stuff I prefer the VG-99 for live, especially if I travel by plane. In the studio I love the Axe-FX but I still have to dive deeper into its editing. In the future I want to play them both at a time – I never had such a fantastic sound as when I tied them up!

>A Tribute To Some Bizarre Vol. 2

And Italian DJ Rocca features “Lux” from 1982 on his December 2009 chart.

The book PopBasel

Schaltkreis Wassermann as the oldest electronic music group of the region is featured on one and a half pages with a nice historic foto but unfortunately the text remains quite superficial and doesn’t even mention the deep connection with psychedelics that Schaltkreis had right from the beginning. (More about this in my blog LSD and musical creativity.)

Also the text in the book gives the impression that Stella & PJ Wassermann stopped making music after their hits with Matterhorn Project which couldn’t be farther from the truth with nearly ten albums between then and now. You can see the currently available albums on the hypermusic website.

Apart from that the book is very nicely designed with lots of photographs and gives a great overview of the many facettes of pop music in and around Basel and the musicians that made it come to life. The book is accompanied by a CD that also features the track “Zeit und Raum” by Schaltkreis Wassermann.

Maybe future historians will dig deeper…

In the studio I tend to focus on precision, polishing melody lines but losing spontaneity. In the live room I play wilder and more uninhibited especially when we are playing together through the whole live set. We record eight tracks simultaneously on the MacBookPro via the MOTU UltraLite interface.

Although I make more mistakes I prefer the live feeling, especially as I can still cut and paste the best parts for the CD…

For those of you interested in the development of a musical work over time:
it has been recorded live as a stereo feed (Stella’s vocals, Stella’s Kaossilator, PJ’s guitar plus the backing tracks) at a rehearsal on the island of Ibiza on October 14th 2009.

In my opinion the backing track is way too soft but the whole recording has a nice feel.

The festival was centered around the beautiful guitars of Ecki Hoffmann who organised it – with my Fender Stratocaster and my Roland VG-99 virtual guitar processor I felt a bit like the devil’s advocate.

It was a great gig in the middle of the pittoresque San Fernando village although the stage monitoring wasn’t set up well for us. My guitar was way too loud in our monitors so I constantly had to fight with a howling feedback. Still we felt quite easy at playing and improvised a lot which I like most.

It was very nice to play with Pierre Alain. He adds an extra dimension of percussive variety and power to our already quite massive backing tracks. I had been mixing them anew from ground up in the last few weeks to make them even more danceable without losing those ethereal parts that some people love most in our music.

We won quite some fans who came after the show to congratulate us! Not bad for the Formentera audience that is often called orthodox or even dogmatic and that is very much into blues, rock and those eternal seventies hymns by Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones etc. that everybody keeps playing in the balearic ex-hippie scene. . .

Unfortunately the next morning the sky was cloudy and rain was expected. So we said goodbye to the wonderful beaches of Formentera and headed back to our Ibiza headquarters.