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
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.
My second double-neck
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.
Look at the size of that 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.
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