First few concerts where I'm playing the electic cello are done. We have a group called Club.Cello which consists of 6 beginner adult cellists who all learn with the same teacher, Ferenc Gyimes. The ones who have been playing the longest have played about one and a half years now and on the other end of the scale myself, with just a bit over 6 months of playing experience under my belt. We have performed short showcase gigs in the season ending events of Ostrobothnian Music Academy. On Monday 21.5. we played in Alavus, yesterday in Kurikka and tomorrow we will play in Seinäjoki. That will be the biggest one.

Our showcase set consists of 2 songs: Mascabnis "Intermezzo" and "The Great Pretender" (Freddie Mercury). These give me an ample opportunity to take advantage of the special features of electric cello. In "intermezzo" I use a pitch shifter to lower the sound of my cello a full octave and play the contrabass part. In "The Great Pretender" I have a couple of solo parts that I play with a guitar-like sound with distortion.

I'll do a post about cello effects at some point but in short, cello can handle way less distortion than a guitar. With guitar you want the extra compression and resulting sustain that comes from the distortion. With cello you do those with the bow so too much distortion very quickly starts to sound like a mess.