‘Visions’ is the fourth solo album from Fusion Guitar master Prashant Aswani set for release on December 18 2012. Prashant, an ESP Endorsee with his own signature model, wrote and arranged all of the tracks on Visions and also produced and engineered the recording. Mixing was shared by Aswani with John Cranfield. Prashant called upon Incubus drummer Jose Pasillas who features on all 12 instrumental tracks and bass player Gabe Rosales. Jeff Kollman also makes a guest solo appearance on the song, “Left of Center”.
This album is instantly recognisable as Prashant Aswani not only from his smooth lead tone (check out this post from Prashant about how he got his lead tone on his last album ‘Sonically Speaking’) and his use of the trem bar (a la Jeff Beck) to bend into notes and phrases. The opening track “Your Call” has some interesting sections that I think use a slide (I could be wrong, Update: I was wrong, Prashant has just informed me that he used a Custom Fretless ESP guitar how cool is that!) to create Indian flavoured melodies and some cool effects one that sounds a bit like ring modulator (Update: an original Tycobrae Octavia is used in the A sections). Most of Prashant’s music is very much Jazz influenced but he always has a couple of heavy rock moments on his albums which I love, for instance the track “Left Of Center” has a driving crunchy riff throughout, another track is “Crispy” which switches between a traditional rock riff section and what I would call a more Jazz Fusion section. There is always a lot of variation in styles, tempos etc. on Prashant’s albums such as “Motivated To Run” which slowly builds from the intro which has tremelo guitars throbbing away the main theme until it reaches the crescendo after a couple of minutes with a blistering guitar solo.
But don’t just take my word for it Prashant has kindly uploaded a sampler to Soundcloud which you can check out below and has snippets from each of the tracks on the album for you to listen to:
