Aimee Norwich Making Friends CD

In 2001, she started recording Making Friends after she built her analog home studio in San Francisco. 'I wanted do everything myself, from building the gear in my studio to mixing and producing the record.

' So, that's what I did.

' Then, after a cross-country move to the Northeast in 2004, she chucked her analog tape decks, bought ProTools , and finished Making Friends in her Brooklyn apartment in 2006. 'I brought a lot of musician friends into my studio to play the horn and drum parts; and I played all of the other instruments, along with some instruments I designed and / or built myself,' says Norwich.

One of the main instruments used on the recording is Aimee's original design of a hybrid bass. It is a modified ¾ scale Fender bass. The three highest strings are piccolo strings, which are in the guitar register, and are on a different circuit than the E bass string. The E string has a custom one-string bass pickup and the piccolo strings use a guitar pickup. There is a stereo output which allows Aimee to split the signal and run the bass and piccolo strings on separate signal paths; thus allowing her to play bass and guitar parts simultaneously through different amplifiers. The oscillator she built, with a customized chassis and other added components, may be heard in the ending noise landscape on the last song, I Never (reprise). Finally she uses a 15 string guitar with a metal key pad and nails hammered into the neck by her design. With its percussive, metallic, saw-like timbre, it adds a wall of sound in the middle of the horn-embedded track, 25 Summers. 'I got into instrument design many years ago. I like making things that no one else has, it gives me more of an original sound'This is what 80's synth pop guru Howard Jones has to say about Aimee: "I came across a fascinating musician today Aimee Norwich, she plays bass but makes it sound like a million different instruments..."

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