Disquiet Junto 0758 Background Noise

The Junto assignment this week is to "Play into the distraction."

My Sunday morning routine includes watching ABC's Insiders program about Australian politics, which this week featured a distraction in the form of discussion of the Prime Minister's appearance on a podcast.

I should declare at this point that I have never subscribed to a podcast and don't understand why I would want to listen to such inanities, particularly when a transcription can be consumed much quicker. 

As the venerable Fourth Estate disappears with the loss of journalism, and takes with it the important function of digesting policy and presenting a range of views rather than regurgitating press releases, we're left with mindless entertainment such as social media rushing into the vacuum.

An example of the inanity of this situation was provided in the distraction that followed Anthony Albanese's admission that he fancied Kylie Minogue, which is surprising because I think it would unAustralian to say one doesn't admire her contributions to popular culture that continue over decades. 

So I found myself playing the blues as the esteemed journalists on the Insiders couch discussed the depths plumbed by the Prime Minister as a range of other significant policy discussions were disregarded without any acknowledgement of Ms Minogue's undeniable sex appeal. 

Seven Bad System Dwarves

 

naviarhaiku653 – through the keyhole

The haiku shared by Naviar Records this week found me exploring reverse delay as a representation of fog.

I've been playing with the idea of using two Chase Bliss Habit pedals as a way of providing instrumentation.

Originally this was patched for my double-neck guitar, but I thought I'd try the Nukulele for this piece. 

Oscillators vs modulators

Great gates

I believe that gating is the future.

The simple binary effect of opening and closing a signal is one at the start of production for me.

In my remixing of playgrounds it was a way to isolate tones, then manipulate them.

Those lingering metal notes from old slides, in particular, became so much more usable with this approach before pitching them into key and adding delay or reverb.

 

When I moved to recording drums the gates became a way to remove the room sound, before adding a studio reverb modelled on a more famous room.

One of the most creative ways I've used gates was to run a sequencer through a crossover, then have the kick open a pitched-down treatment while the hats opened a pitched up one.

I would strum a chord and suddenly a bassline would pulse while a rhythmic urgency pulsed, giving my simple playing a feeling like making live techno.

Then I got interested in how Rainger FX had used a gate in a range of pedals to make the effect part of expression in my playing.

It prompted me to look at the pedals I had that weren't being used with new eyes and the B pedal board suddenly became the one I was using the most.

Now I looking at the range of stutter effects and wondering how even more variety can be incorporated, especially now I'm thinking about a pedal board for a double-neck instrument.

I can't believe there aren't more guitar pedals with a crossover effect, but then again, I'm also surprised there aren't more using gates.

Guitarspiration

Every now and then I catch sight of this guitar.

I think it's the most audacious instrument that I've seen in years, with the resonant strings crossing over all those extra pickups.

It gives me hope that something as much as a mainstay as the Stratocaster design can still develop, because so much of contemporary culture seems stuck looking backwards.

And it reminds me there are a pile of pickguards and guitar bodies that are waiting for me to do something different. 

Clips Split on burnout

There was a time when I wasn’t shooting a lot, because I wasn’t using the proper tool. Then my mentor told me I needed to invest in my tools, so I bought an $800 point-and-shoot, which is crazy, because they break. But now I never get burnt out on shooting my own work. I only feel “burnt out” when I’m future tripping, thinking about what’s next, what I “need” to be doing. I get burnt out on the fantasy of what my career will become. Showing my work in any capacity outside of Instagram gets me back on my path, into alignment with the present, with how I feel in the moment when I am shooting. 

My second double-neck

Built a new double-neck since I wanted bass on the bottom and a fretless neck, which seems a weird fetish but I'll own it.

Disquiet Junto 0757 Screen Time

The assignment this week is to "Interpret [a] gauzy window treatment as an audio effect."

My first impulse was to record the guitar set-up I recently plugged together that uses a Chase Bliss Audio Lossy pedal, but my kids are home and I haven't much opportunity to jam to arrive at something worth recording.

So I wasn't sure I'd respond to the Junto, until I watched Hamnet with my daughter last night.

There's a moment after the death of the titular character where he's shown beyond veil of death and it's literally filmed through a dark piece of cloth.

(Hopefully that's not a spoiler for anyone but, frankly, if you didn't already know that the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet has been thought to have contributed to his play Hamlet then it's probably not a film you'll be watching anyway!)

This led me to ponder whether the window gauze might be something more than a filter or a gate?

Also, this morning my Facebook Memories included the Junto track Beatin' Leeton from six years ago that I thought would be good material to manipulate. 

From there my idea was that going beyond the veil in this case is to use Ableton Live's convert to MIDI functions as a way to go beyond the audio tracks, with bass and drum parts generated with those transcriptions being fed into arpeggiators as well as the aforementioned effects.

New synth

 

Bob Dylan on being 80

The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that nothing was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program. You’re not rushing to become anything, and you’re not haunted by the things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.