Going deep

I've been recording responses to the Disquiet Junto for over a decade

This has amassed over 500 recordings from, to date, 738 weekly prompts, those sometimes cryptic instructions issued by Marc Weidenbaum to an online community.

Most weeks there are dozens of recordings and I've learned as much from how the members respond, as I have from undertaking the tasks.

These activities are often musical, sometimes other audio formats, and interpretation is a lot more flexible than one might initially expect.

Some weeks it turns out worse than one hopes, but some weeks the results are surprisingly sublime.

There's a lot one learns along the way, but one of the highlights is when one sees something unexpected.

Just as we have many roles in our lives, there can be many versions in our audio productions and I feel I've explored other lives.

And some weeks, I see the prompt and can't help but watch my mind race ahead with possibilities.

Like this week I saw the title and got a way toward having a track finished before the prompt was published.

However, then the assignment arrived saying "Make music focused on sympathetic strings, or something akin to them."

And I realised that I'd misread the title as "Deepest Symphonies"!

Bill Callahan on staying hydrated

A lot of people, me included, only have so many creative hours inside them every day. It’s a little thing that gets replenished every day—but just a certain amount, like a jug of water. That’s your water for the day. No matter how much you wish there was more water in that pitcher, it’s just like, “No, it’s empty, but it’ll probably be full tomorrow if you do your other responsibilities and take care of yourself.” I learned and accepted that creative work is a finite thing. I used to treat it like an infinite fountain that I would just bathe in for 14 hours a day, but then I realized I’m just sitting in it. There’s no new water coming out of the fountain.

DAD bass

 

Quackology

Over a few months I've sampled a variety of guitar pickups

It began when I sensed a relationship between the bar magnet on the underside of a pickup and a strong attack in the sound it gave to an amplified guitar.

Last year I went overboard buying different types of guitar pickups and then trialling different wiring options.

Different pickups are often distinguished by their resistance, which accentuates the placement along the strings from the neck as higher amounts are favoured closer to the bridge.

While there are many aspects one would expect, such as dynamics and presence, I found the presentation of characteristics lack a specific quality.

There are charts showing brightness and darkness, treble and bass, harsh and muddy -- okay, I made up the last one -- but I can't think of any mentioning quack.

The quack of a pickup is a characteristic that exists on a similar spectrum and becomes more pronounced as one progresses from neck to bridge.

A quack is one expression of this sound, which begins more like a burr that becomes more throaty and pronounced as distortion adds harmonics.

I think telecasters are renowned for this honky character and I suspect the harmonics with placement of the bridge pickup are central to it.

However, many highly-wound and higher-output pickups seem to also accentuate this sound.

In my explorations I feel as though there's a scale of quack that begins with the Texas variety of pickup, then extends into bluesier and rockier characters as much as country.

As satisfying as the character sounds with a Tweed style distortion or a Marshall grunt, it's not always ideal.

For example, a serve of twang wouldn't sit with that classic stratocaster sound in the soaring leads of Clapton or Gilmour.

It's just a different flavour, yet the quack isn't as easy to pick as guitar builds.

I've figured out that I like single coils more than ceramic pickups, which use the bar magnet, and am now trialling double coils.

When I began installing different humbuckers I found that some had a twang, while others gave a harsh blast or a deep and thick sustain.

This is why I feel like a quack rating system is needed, and it could be represented with ducks.

I haven't paddled very deeply into the waters of humbucking, but I expect the pond is full of many styles of quack.

Potato Cake

Bought a guitar to try scalloped frets and am enjoying the expressive playing. 

Also amused by the "fig leaf" sticker placed over the counterfeit branding of this purchase from China. 

You can feel the cheaper materials in the shiny neck and plastic tuning pegs, as well as hearing a hum from the bridge pickup; but we live in an age where cheap guitars are made by automated routing in countries that don't respect IP -- so the playability is basically comparable with another Chinese guitar aside from copying the famous Swede.  

I'm debating whether to install bright '60s-style pickups, or surfier '50s, or gnarly Texas ones.  

Or a combination?

The name "potato cake" comes to mind, because they're called scallops in some parts of Australia.

The Flying Patch Monster

 

Disquiet Junto 0738 Speak Not

The assignment this week is: Saying something without saying it. 

Somewhat appropriately the phrase ‘I think therefore I am’ came to mind.

I’d spent the morning helping my son with his composition assignment and he had a riff-driven song that was going to be a scaffold.

After lunch the phrase developed into a call-and-response riff, which suggests that my son’s scaffold also became my own.

The phrase was answered, "I am therefore I think."

As this bassline from my phrase took on soul with organ and horns, and the percussion was another cue from the source/riff track.

All parts were programmed in Ableton Live and the video is from NASA.

Les Telecaster

I'm still chiselling cheap teles and am currently enjoying these PAF-style humbuckers with black hardware.

Naviarhaiku632 – slowly gliding

 

The haiku shared by Naviar this week offered a snail's perspective and I sought to do it justice by singing about powerlessness and communicating within shells.

Further inspiraton was sought from Seamus Heaney's republic of conscience.

The nature of the problem

 

Disquiet Junto 0737 Opening Ceremony

My child has musical homework and we were discussing the option of using an existing track to scaffold a feel.

The track they chose seems unlikely to me, since it’s nearly 50 years old, but it’s been a week for revisiting old songs and I’ve been enjoying the swing in this one.

I’ve heard that James Brown thought every instrument should sound like a drum, so I’ve made as many into percussion as I could handle in this cover of a Dr John song.

It's 1999

 

Naviarhaiku631 – Spring day

 

A bit tangentially related the to haiku shared by Naviar this week, as I wrote a song inspired by this poem and added a video of my recent haiga exhibition.

There is a thin layer of a theme in the sense that dust plays a role. 

Catherine O’Hara on the importance of having a sense of humor

My parents were blessed – they laughed until the end. That’s the best way to live, because there’s so much sadness. You’re really lucky if your sense of humor is encouraged, because I think we’re all born with it, and if it’s encouraged in your life, that’s a gift.

Disquiet Junto 0736 Feed Me

The Junto assignment is to: Write a piece of music emulating the dopamine engine that is social media. 

This is the last of the Chinchin videos that I downloaded from Archive.org and they’ve been fun to mix with my tracks by matching the tempo. 

I reached for it when I had the image of an automaton doomscrolling being all robotic. 

Like the video, all the song fragments came from my folder of unfinished Live files.

Then I had the idea of mashing it with the song I've been working on this afternoon.

It's not terrible and seems tangentially related to the subject matter.

When you start working

 

Naviarhaiku630 – one leaf falls

The haiku shared by Naviar prompted me to remix parts that I recorded this week.

Me wringing the last drops

 

Disquiet Junto 0735 Spectrum Analysis

The Junto assignment this week is to "Write music inspired by a crayon" or specifically a colour.

It's been hot enough to melt a crayon in Leeton this week with temperatures in the mid-40s.

My colour is soft blue as I found myself fantasising about the winters in Canberra, where I grew up.

There you have those bright high-altitude skies, where the sunlight seems crisp yet the air is frigid. 

It brought to mind the crunch of frost and with it the "blonde assassin" in Emily Dickinson's poem, as well as the happy flowers and their impermanence.

So I riffed on her imagery and arrived at something about unrequited love, then riffed on the guitar.

Blank

My next guitar arrived today

A letter for you

 

Naviarhaiku629 – autumn storm

I was playing the drums when it occurred to me the beat might be a way to start working on a track.

The poem shared by Naviar Records came to mind, so I played in Live with adding a bass and synth part.

Car for pianists

 

Disquiet Junto 0734 Meet Cue

The Disquiet Junto assignment this week is to "Write music for a scene from a favorite film." 

A friend of my mother has a husband who taught film studies, so naturally I asked his favourite film.

It seemed like a question that he'd been asked before as without a pause he replied "Brief Encounter."

A friend of mine sends an email at the end of the year about movies and mentioned this film was on a public streaming service, so I started watching it with a view to using it in the Junto.

As I played guitar I couldn't help but use the chords that were recorded earlier in the week, so when I saw this scene I decided that it would suit a remix of that song.

Hey are we still going to hang out later?

 

Naviarhaiku628 – In the dark beyond

 

This poem shared by Naviar Records brought to mind some lyrics that I'd been writing which take inspiration from Alice Walker's Reassurances. 

I had a chord progression and an afternoon, so it's a quick recording as a muddle my way through an idea. 

The video is a recording made of my backyard that didn't get used for the Disquiet Junto project last week. 

Fretless player

Dunno but I feel like maybe I can forgive those people who badly park cars as big as semitrailers, if I think of them as fans of semitones and microtonal composition.

Tuxedo telecaster

Just finished modifying this telecaster with a stratocaster pickguard, Texas pickups and an Artist Bullbucker in the bridge. 

I haven't been able to get the split coil to work, so might make the pull pot switch into a Gilmour mod instead. 

Bill Callahan on media

If that person could see me in my life, they would not even dream of calling me a craftsman. I picture a craftsman as the guy who’s got his tools all labelled in boxes and shelves and knows where everything is. I’m more of a drunk professor; I like happenstance and coincidence and mistakes. I know nothing about synthesisers, but I’ll randomly pick one and turn it on and start recording. I press some buttons and play something and somehow try to make it work. I’m only precise about writing the lyrics and then the rest of it is more like: throw it at the wall. I don’t know anything about chord progressions. It’s more being open and receiving things from wherever they come from. I feel more like a medium.

My Fender bender

I had an idea to merge elements of Telecaster and Stratocaster designs.

The Strat pickguard looks so right with the Tele body shape and I'm happy to make a mess of a cheap guitar before I try building one.

Chender Meteora

About two months ago I saw my guitar on a Chinese website.

The price was around a third of what I paid for a secondhand model and curiousity got the better of me, so I ordered it.

After a couple of weeks the seller abruptly cancelled the sale, possibly because the discount offered by the site undercut profitability.

I weighed up whether to continue my experiment and decided to buy a different model, rather than a replica of the one I already own.

Yesterday my "Chender" Meteora arrived and there were a number of obvious differences.

The Chinese copy is lighter than my Mexican original, but that's not a bad thing for me.

There's a shiny finish to the neck that is a bit sticky when playing, as well as a yellow hue that seems unnatural in comparison.

One really obvious visual detail was the pickup covers were uneven, they have different heights but also seem to be slightly different sizes as well.

I've loosened the screws and shifted them a little, but it's not quite yet symmetrical.

Otherwise it feels good, with no sharp fret edges and very good intonation.

The electrics are a bit weird, from potentiometer knobs that stick when being turned through to pickups that sound peaky in a way that suggests ceramics.

However, I am happy to change the electrics and will try some fatter-sounding pickups than the nicely nuanced Fireballs in my Fender.

I will also install split-coil switches like the Meteoras normally feature.

As a fan of hand-drawn art and the human touch one experiences from engaging with creative practise, I find the lettering on the large headstock endearing.

It wasn't immediately obvious until I looked at the regular-size headstock on my Mexican Meteora, particularly when you see how the "A" at the end of the brand seems to drift into the background.

 

Band auditions today

 

Disquiet Junto 0732 Color Drenching

The Junto project this week is to "Record a piece of music that you think sounds like color drenching."

I've recorded shades of my Donner DTL-100 telecaster-style guitar, which has been modified with Texas pickups and a super switch.

There's a drum loop recorded on a Korg Kaossilator, as well as a snippet of that instrument added at a couple of points. 

Below is a video where I reflect on the Junto project.

My underwear watching

...and guitars
 

Modified telecaster

Yesterday I installed a "super switch" in a telecaster style guitar and it was fiddly but added a couple of extra tones

I'd already added Texas-style pickups and they sound remarkable, but the parallel option with the new switch has got me playing chugging riffs today.

The guitar was a cheap one from Donner, which is a good model for modifications aside from the gritty eco-rosewood fretboard and slightly too small bridge pickup slot.

Modified Fender Stratocaster

Made some changes to this guitar that I was given

New pickguard looks good, although I now wish that I'd changed the volume pot while it was apart. 

I was in a hurry to hear the Fat '50s pickups and also added a Gilmour mod with a pull-pot under the tone knob.