Guitar Synths
A couple of years before the pandemic, I obtained the EHX Syn-9 pedal which turns your guitar signal into synthesiser sounds. It's a cool pedal because it allows you to play synth runs as a guitar player, and suddenly your palette sounds like a mid to late 80s pop rock outfit. I've played with it live and people are taken aback when you dial it in and suddenly there's a fat Prophet IV sound coming out of the guitar amp.
During work on Cosmic Orphans, I decided I would use the Syn-9 pedal as the backbone sound. I would use it to play all the sections that I would normally assign to keyboard or rhythm guitar during the basic outline of the tracks. Then, just before the pandemic hit, I managed to get hold of the Boss SY-300 pedal, and that fit right into the sound of Cosmic Orphans too.
When I played early demos of those tracks to some people, I got the response "but why would you want to turn your guitar into a synth?" It struck me as odd that people would want to ask that. The same people are okay with the guitar signal going through overdrives, distortions, modulations, and so on. Somehow they drew the line at guitar synths. Why wouldn't you expand the palette of guitar sounds to include synths? It was weird.
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