Last Friday I spent a couple of hours recording some samples and sound ideas for Glasgow music-maker Unexpected Bowtie to screw around with. Here’s one of the songs which he put together recently using samples given to him by Citizen Tank.

degrading into a party, and nothing respectable by unexpectedbowtie

I’m looking forward to hearing what he does with the sounds I gave him. Here’s a wee selection of the gear I used to make the samples:

My ever-faithful Fender Jazz bass which I bought from Steve Lawson in 1993 or 1994 (we couldn’t remember) after seeing Eden Burning play a gig in Edinburgh:

The Orange bass amp that I ‘rescued’ from the tip in Inverness whilst recycling some cardboard boxes one wintry Saturday afternoon:

My Cole Clark acoustic guitar. I was doing the sound at a Garth Hewitt gig in Inverness a few years ago, and his daughter had just bought him a Cole Clark acoustic. I loved the sound of it so much I eventually went out and bought one myself:

A couple of my pedals. I suppose I shouldn’t really be putting my acoustic guitar through a bass distortion pedal, but if it sounds good…

My Marshall acoustic amp which I got on Gumtree not long after moving to Stirling.

Pro Tools 7.3. It’s up to 10 now but when I compare it to the Tascam cassette four-track I used to use, it’s like entering audio utopia.

Izotope’s awesome iDrum. I wrote most of the drum loops for my latest album using this plug-in as well.

A record by, what appears to be, some kind of Hare Krishna propaganda band. It didn’t actually sound quite as odd as I’d hoped it would, so a little time-stretching was in order:

And lastly, the broken-down hi-fi which I bought from my church youth group leader nearly 20 years ago. I’m sure he’d be glad to hear it’s still in use, helping me sample Gouranga-shouting oddballs: