Stanley Lighthead - instrumental jazz-funk trio

[gearhed289]

Sounds cool Harry, thanks for sharing. And yes, the EP is still a thing, because I said so!  My band Nomadic put out a 4 song last December, both physical and digital download. We're going to record 7 more tracks to make a full length release for 2018. Keep posting the SL stuff here, looking forward to more!

[hieronymous]

Thanks Tom - reminded me to purchase your EP! Sounds awesome - have you advertised it here yet? Did you use your Alembic on it?

[hieronymous]

And - another track is ready for preview!

https://soundcloud.com/stanleylighthead/sol-jamming-1



This one started out more straight-ahead, but for some reason we attacked it on this take and liked how it turned out. I used my HBE Hematoma bass overdrive. I'm not a jazz musician but my guitarist is, so part of the development of the band's sound is how we negotiate that tension.

[edwardofhuncote]

You guys sound great on YouTube, Harry... been listening up in my shop this afternoon... I'm afraid if I downloaded the SoundCloud app, my poor old Galaxy S5 would just melt on the spot. 

I'll put it on at work next week though.   

*by the way, "AKA AFB" is stuck in my head now!

[gearhed289]

Thanks Tom - reminded me to purchase your EP! Sounds awesome - have you advertised it here yet? Did you use your Alembic on it?

EP went in the mail Saturday, thank you! The opening track was done on my 4003S when it had Activators on it, but I have since gone back to Ric toaster and high gain passive pickups. I decided to let the Ric be a Ric, and the Alembic be an Alembic! I plan to use the Distillate on 2 new tracks.

I love your guitar players tone and style. Hematoma is my favorite bass overdrive! Seems HBE is sadly no more.

[hieronymous]

You guys sound great on YouTube, Harry... been listening up in my shop this afternoon... I'm afraid if I downloaded the SoundCloud app, my poor old Galaxy S5 would just melt on the spot. 

I'll put it on at work next week though.   

*by the way, "AKA AFB" is stuck in my head now!

Thanks for listening! Definitely don't blow up your phone!

Thanks Tom - reminded me to purchase your EP! Sounds awesome - have you advertised it here yet? Did you use your Alembic on it?

EP went in the mail Saturday, thank you! The opening track was done on my 4003S when it had Activators on it, but I have since gone back to Ric toaster and high gain passive pickups. I decided to let the Ric be a Ric, and the Alembic be an Alembic! I plan to use the Distillate on 2 new tracks.

I love your guitar players tone and style. Hematoma is my favorite bass overdrive! Seems HBE is sadly no more.

Got the CD - thanks! I actually found a thread about it on progarchives.com - that place is kind of weird, people are obsessed with genre and the forum software is kind of messed up so it can be hard to post anything.

I hear you on letting a Ric be a Ric - I love the stock electronics in my 8-string, but it would be cool to have one with Activators too! Looking forward to hearing the Distillate!

I didn't realize HBE went out of business. My Hematoma is really dark but it worked for this project. I'm still searching for "my" distortion/overdrive...

[gearhed289]

Progarchives.com is interesting. It took several months to make it through a committee of moderators around the world before we got categorized ("heavy prog") and listed on the site, along with the review.

[hieronymous]

Time for another Stan Lighthead track - this has become one of my favorites, this is the only time I'm playing clean with fingers, plus used the low B a lot during the guitar solo. My strings were really dirty and dead, but I like the sound on here - bass was recorded direct, with my always-on CAE tube compressor & Boss PQ-3B parametric eq boosting the low end:

https://soundcloud.com/stanleylighthead/at-the-temple


And special just for the Club - video of the same song from the day before at Bill TGO's Labor Day party!


https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=spXJMgPHZ7w

[hieronymous]

Long overdue updating this thread - all four songs, all 5-string Stanley Clarke Signature²:

https://soundcloud.com/stanleylighthead/sets/forthcoming-ep-preview


Swamp Grass is an original by Dave Wright, the Stan guitarist, that he wrote for the band. Spur of the moment I decided to kick on my distortion - either I forgot I had turned it on or I was trying to turn on the volume boost part of the pedal, but the first phrase of my solo is clean - oops! But it's kind of nice to hear the contrast of sound.

At the Temple - spontaneously composed at a rehearsal almost 5 years ago, the original incarnation of the band before we went on hiatus - basically Dave the guitarist came up with the rhythm part over something Patrick was playing on drums, so it's credited to those two.

Sol Jamming - this is another one from 2013, spontaneously composed during rehearsal. That was the first year of the band, we were playing at least once a month consistently, I was recording everything, we came up with a fair amount of original stuff. I also decided on this one to spontaneously kick on the distortion - my Jack Bruce influence?

Schnappes - this was a spontaneous composition 15 years ago with my old band mates from over 20 years ago - Gary Backstrom, guitarist of my old band Jiggle the Handle, and Greg DeGuglielmo of Max Creek, he was also in Jiggle the Handle for a while and lots of other stuff, including much if not most of my music in hieronymous.

I've listened to this stuff too much - need to make a push to get it ready to release on Bandcamp!

[hieronymous]

Here's one of the live recordings - Wolf recorded it for me, thank you Wolf! Came out great, much better than the H2n that I was running on the hill.


https://soundcloud.com/stanleylighthead/aka-incomplete-live

[rv_bass]

Sounds great, very cool!

[hieronymous]

I took some time off from this project - I finally got sick of listening over and over, trying to balance the instruments, etc. Well, after a break I'm back at it! Working on warming up the guitar sounds - problem is, I worked on each track individually, so I'm having to dig back in and figure things out for each song! It's fun though, and I'm using my vintage Roland Space Echo RE-201, both for the reverb & occasional delay. This is my favorite one so far:

https://soundcloud.com/stanleylighthead/at-the-temple-new-mix

[pauldo]

I enjoyed that, it was rather Temple-ish with a meditative kinda groove.  Sounds more defined than the older mix.


Harry, which bass and effect(s) are you playing on Swamp Grass?

[gearhed289]

Sounds good to me!

[hieronymous]

I enjoyed that, it was rather Temple-ish with a meditative kinda groove.  Sounds more defined than the older mix.


Harry, which bass and effect(s) are you playing on Swamp Grass?

Thanks - I think I'm finally zero-ing on the mix for all this stuff - I spent so much time on it before and ended up lost and sick of it! But I think the time off did me good!

I'm using my 5-string Stanley Clarke on all of these tracks, played through a CAE tube compressor direct into ProTools. The distortion tracks are the HBE Hematoma Bass Overdrive. During the bass solo in Swamp Grass I ran the signal through my SF-2 during mixing to emphasize some of the midrange frequencies to make it stand out more. I find the Hematoma to be pretty dark - but it seemed to work on this stuff, helped me channel my inner-Jack Bruce.