Disquiet Junto 0776 Let’s Resonate

My maternal great-grandmother spoke with spirits and it seemed to embarrass my grandmother, but a contemporary view sees that it was one of a few forms of public employment that a woman could offer at that time.

That side of my family are Quakers and it was the most significant religious experience in my upbringing.

One of the aspects of their worship that has influenced me is the idea of being moved by the spirit to speak and, while I haven't been to a Friends' meeting in recent decades, it's something has interested me more and more.

I see a role for reflection and recognising the divine within, but it's something that I mostly nurture in my creative pursuits.

So I had an idea some weeks ago that a Halloween Junto project could be working with the spiritual as well as the physical resonances in a space to investigate whether it's haunted or just musical.

This weekend all my children are at home so I wasn't sure I'd get to record something, but Sunday gave me a couple of opportunities.

The first was an experiment with the FM1 synth that I'd been meaning to use.

I tried a few of the various firmwares, and it really is amazing how this platform has exploded with instruments and interfaces, but the learning curve for some of them led me to pick a simple option.

Purple Monkey is designed for toddlers and doesn't let you play a "wrong" note, so it made it easy to complete something.

It wasn't very satisfying though and I really wanted to use a guitar that I finished building this week.

I have been building lots of guitars and pondering why so many people crave a design that hasn't changed much in decades.

This particular instrument I built with three outputs each going to a different effects chain.

I had been listening to the overhead fan and the ultrasonic cleaner, which seemed to suggest a key.

Then I played around with a riff and improvised a couple of sections based on the glitchy results.

 

Love me three times

I built a guitar with three outputs because I love effects

There's a pickup on the low string, another for the top three and then the bridge for all six.

Willie Nelson on heavy thoughts

Some folks can live with heavy thoughts for a long time. Not me. I turn heavy thoughts into song. And the turning hardly ever fails to lighten the thought. It maybe even makes the thought disappear into thin air. 

Alan Moore on art

Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness. 

Disquiet Junto 0773 Garden Glitch

 

The Junto prompt this week is "Record a piece of music that sounds like a once healthy garden going to waste, growing wild, collapsing under its own weight, or some other form of decay." 

It follows from the gardening analogy last week and brought to mind that I recorded three takes at that time. 

I went back to the recordings and found the final take was somewhat unruly. 

There was clipping, which led me to re-amp the guitar with the Woodrow emulation.

Then I added some reverb to give it more weight.

Disquiet Junto 0772 Garden Grow

 

The Junto this week is "Tend to your music like Brian Eno might." 

Brian Eno has a lot of cool things to say about making stuff. 

I remember the gardening idea was one I found along with sprouting about generative systems. 

This board let me plant a few seeds, starting with a loop on the Blooper pedal and then a shorter one on the Mood. 

Afterward I added a couple of synth parts, which were generated as MIDI in Live. 

I kept adding things and it probably needs a prune to open it up a bit and let the light back in.

When someone starts coiling cable

 

naviarhaiku666 – speak of the devil!

The haiku shared by Naviar this week prompted me to swap back to an older pedal board.

I put these Chase Bliss effects together a few months ago, then set up the board with two Habit pedals.

This one gets unlikely sounds from my ukulele, because the loop is tuned down two octaves and made into a synth sound while the other output puts Lossy into Mood.