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.

Look at the size of that thing!

Even with free shipping I couldn't buy this thing.

The face of my delivery guy, Eric, came to mind and I really couldn't. 

One wonders if it has inside it a speaker and one end and a mic at the other, or maybe a really big spring? 

A wit elsewhere remarked that it is a room reverb, but I don't think I could fit my drums inside. 

Brave kids

 

Does music create boundaries?

I prefer the idea that music was how oral communication developed among early peoples and there are a range of bonding aspects when people share music through singing and dancing that are useful to exploit in classrooms, for example.

Susan Rogers, a recording engineer turned academic, once said to me that the future of music lies in timbre, which is where the abstract notion of notes becomes so much more engaging through the inflections of instruments and the memories they create and prompt.