Silk and steel — bad-ass, or strictly for wusses?.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve tried silk and steel strings.

I’ve always thought of them as a transitional set for students migrating from nylon to steel strings. At least that’s how my mom used to explain them to me back when she was giving me my first lessons. Like many players, I viewed them more as a remedy for tender fingertips than a sound you’d actively seek out.

But over time, almost everything I thought I knew about strings turned out to be wrong. So I figured I’d give silk-and-steels a fresh listen.

This thread over at the Acoustic Guitar Forum seems like a fair summary of common attitudes about these strings. Opinions seems divided between players who simply find silk-and-steel strings too soft and quiet to be of much use, and those who enjoy them for fingerstyle playing, especially on small-bodied guitars.

I’ve been frustrated finding the right strings for the old Martin acoustic I picked up last year. I had a violent reaction against coated bronze strings, which I wrote about here. But I was was kind of digging the way Martin Marquis 80/20s bronze strings sounded on the instrument, as heard in this video. Sometimes, though, the tone is just too harsh and clacky, so I wanted to try something lighter and softer.

I slapped down this quick duet performance of “Drewrie’s Accordes,” an anonymous lute duet found in The Jane Pickering Lute Book, a manuscript anthology of late 16th-century lute pieces. (This would have been played on gut strings in its day, and is usually performed on nylon-string classical guitar or lute today. My steel treble strings are definitely not historically correct, though some wire-stringed fretted instruments such as the cittern did exist in the Renaissance.)

Observations after the video.

Compared to all-metal strings, the silk-and-steels are definitely quieter, with less treble bite. I like their soft, malleable feel for intricate fingerstyle playing like this. They offer relatively smooth transitions between unwound and wound strings. They exhibit less clacky string and fingernail noise. Playing aggressively with a pick definitely “overloads” them, and would no doubt destroy the windings in short order. Even when playing exclusively fingerstyle, you get the sense that the bass strings aren’t long for this world. But I enjoy their sweet, quasi-classical tone, which to my ear does indeed split the difference between nylon and all-metal strings.

Still, I’m not sure I want to commit to having these on the guitar all the time. (I wish the guitar had a switch to toggle between a bronze and silk-and-steel sound!) Also, these are lighter than I usually play (the treble is .0115, and I pretty much never go below .012). But the relaxed tension does seem to suit this particular guitar.

How about you guys? Any experience with these soft-spoken strings? Do you think they sound cool, or are they merely a salve for sore fingers? And has anyone tried John Pearse silk-and-bronze strings? (That’s probably the next stop on this particular string quest.)

P.S.: This is also a pretty good example of how I apply lute techniques to steel-string playing, as I mentioned here. For most of the fast bits, I pick alternately using my right-hand thumb and index finger. A proper classical player would be more likely to alternate index- and middle-finger. Also, my right thumb sometimes drifts “behind” my right-hand fingers (that is, closer to the bridge). Classical players rarely position their picking thumbs closer to the bridge relative to the fingers. It’s not conscious on my part — it just what my hand does when I’m trying to brighten the bass notes and darken the trebles.

The post Silk and Steel Strings Revisited appeared first on tonefiend.com.

Were the Shaggs born 600 years too late?

Here’s reader Freddie Lenzel, writing in response to my post on the bizarre late-medieval composition Fumee fume par fumee:

To me, it sort of sounds like The Shaggs from the Dark Ages. But seriously, it’s really interesting. Greetings from Spain, love your blog.

And I love your comment, Freddie! It really strikes a chord (pun intended), because the Shaggs have always sounded medieval to me. And I think I can explain why.

(But first: If you don’t know the Shaggs, stop reading this second and make your acquaintance with the group and their 1969 magnum opus, Philosophy of the World. Kurt Cobain cited it as one of the five-best albums of all time, and Frank Zappa insisted that the Shaggs were “better than the Beatles,” words that inspired this indie-trash tribute album. Meanwhile, NRBQ’s Terry Adams, who launched the Shaggs revival by getting Philosphy re-released in 1980, rightfully compared their homespun sound to Ornette Coleman’s free jazz.)

The Shaggs weren’t the only band to make an album before they knew how to play or write music, but they were one of the best. Many musicians, when first exposed to the Shaggs’ idiot-savant sound, compare it to what might result if you explained music to an alien species unfamiliar with the concept, and then sent them into the studio before letting them hear any actual music. Shaggs songs have no underlying chord structures, no consistent meter, no conventional phrasing, and little harmonization. It’s just odd, meandering “melodies” that stumble along until singer/guitarist Dot Wiggin happens to require a breath. Why, it’s practically…medieval!

By their own account, the Shaggs had no knowledge of music whatsoever, let alone any insight into pre-Renaissance aesthetics. But in “inventing” music from scratch, they retraced many of the steps taken by their Dark Ages predecessors when they struggled to conceive polyphonic music.

Most modern music has underlying chord structures. Melodies are strung across these structures like cables stretching between the concrete piers of a suspension bridge. But medieval melodies are more like threads in a cobweb — they connect only with each other, not to any underlying framework. In the Middle Ages there were precise (albeit ever-changing) rules governing how the melodies could be constructed and how they could be superimposed, but there was no chordal “superstructure.” Musical cadences usually occur on unisons or octaves, and sometimes fifths. (In fact, the Fumeux fum par fumee phrases that linger on minor triads are among the piece’s most shocking details.) And just as Fumeux wavers uncertainly between 3/4 and 2/4 time, the Shaggs’ music wobbles along with something resembling a pulse, but one that rarely congeals into a recognizable time signature.

Some of our musical conventions are so deeply ingrained, they can feel hardwired into our brains. But they’re not — they really are merely conventions. For me, one of the big attractions of medieval music is the way it offers a glimpse into how musicians dealt with melody, rhythm, harmony, and structure before those conventions had firmly taken root. And I get exactly the same buzz from the Shaggs. (And if you strip away the drums and electric guitars, songs such as “Who Are Parents?” and “My Pal Foot Foot” sound an awful lot like Gregorian chant…)

The post Were the Shaggs Medieval? appeared first on tonefiend.com.

Despair en masse in the Forum!

Mitchell “Super-Freq” Hudson, creator of our DIY Fuzz Face project, made a smart suggestion: Dedicated Forum sections for each of the Tonefiend DIY Club projects.

You’ll find them here. Thanks, Mitchell! :)

The post DIY Club Help in the Forum appeared first on tonefiend.com.

Codex Chantilly: the electrifying page-turner that blew the lid off the perverse musical excesses of the late Middle Ages!

NOTE: I am a known perpetrator of musical hoaxes, but this isn’t one of them. This bizarre composition really is over 600 years old.

As Marsellus Wallace once quipped: “I’m'a get medieval on your ass.”

I’ve been obsessing again on a medieval composition that’s fascinated me since my geeky teens. It’s Fumeux fume par fumee, a bizarre artifact from a bizarre moment in music history: France in the final years of the 14th century.

(If you’re wondering why I was listening to medieval and Renaissance music when I was 17 instead of Zep and Floyd, and what the stuff brings to my guitar playing today, read on. But first, that freaky music!)

The world that produced Fumeux fume par fumee wasn’t your storybook Middle Ages. We’re talking Hundred Years War, Black Death, Papal Schism — and a radical musical style of head-spinning complexity and abstraction. It was dissonant music for dissonant times. The death rattle of the Dark Ages.

The 14th century had witnessed the rise of ars nova, a florid and intellectual style characterized by bold new approaches to counterpoint and musical structure. But by the 1380s or so, ars nova had mutated into ars subtilior, an even more abstract and experimental style.

“Ars nova” means “new art.” It was.

“Ars subtilior” means “more subtle art.” It wasn’t — unless by “subtle,” you mean “characterized by extreme dissonance and chaotic rhythms.” And Fumeux is a perfect embodiment of this radical style.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

WTF, right?

You probably don’t need me to specify why this music is so freaky, but I will anyway: 

• It’s freakishly chromatic.
• It’s freakishly low-pitched.
• Its rhythms are freakishly complex.
• It may have been inspired by a freaky drug cult.

Fumeaux is one of a dozen Codex Chantilly compositions attributed to Solage, a composer about whom we know nothing. However, the song’s cryptic text may refer to an artsy-fartsy smoking club/cult. And in those pre-Columbian days, tobacco was unknown in Europe, so they would have been smoking either hash or opium.

A smoker smokes through smoke
A smoky speculation.
Is, between puffs, his thought:
A smoker smokes through smoke.

For smoking suits him very well
As long as he keeps his intention.
A smoker smokes through smoke
A smoky speculation.

And there are some who believe that reefer-puffin’ jazz cats and acid-baked hippies were the first to combine music and drugs!

Was Solage part of this crowd? Or was he lampooning them with ear-twisting sonorities? We don’t know — though we can probably assume he was a member of one of the avant-garde circles in Paris or Avignon. Here’s part of the original manuscript:

Nope, I’m not reading from that — I worked from a modern edition you can download here. But despite its six-line staff and multi-color note heads (the red ink indicates rhythmic variations), you can at least recognize this as an ancestor of modern notation. That’s less true of these Codex pages, which feature two pieces by a composer named Baude Cordier:

A medieval musical valentine?

On the left is Belle, Bonne, Sage, a courtly love song notated in the form of a heart. (Or maybe it’s a pun of the composer’s name, which sounds like “couer,” the French word for “heart.”) On the right is an “endless canon,” a piece whose melodies echo and circle each other like a brainiac version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” It’s called Tout par compas suy composés — “I was composed with a compass.”

Clever.

I originally tried recording this on acoustic guitar, but the three low-pitched parts sounded too muddy. It just worked better with pick-style baritone guitar. And while Solage probably never envisioned his music being played by a trio of Fender Bass VIs, the choice isn’t as ludicrous as you might think. Music of this era was almost never composed with specific instruments in mind — it was understood that the parts could be played by any available combination of voices and/or instruments. It wasn’t until the later Renaissance that composers began to create specialized parts for specific instruments, and the concept of orchestration was born. (Though orchestras as we think of them didn’t exist until the 18th century.)

Features genuine 14th-century reverb!

Oddly, the most historically authentic aspect of my recording may be its digital reverb. I ran the performance through an Altiverb impulse reponse reverb created in an actual 14th-century castle. (You can read more about the magic of impulse response reverbs here.)

I’ve marveled at this piece for decades, but never tried playing it till I tracked this yesterday. Getting “under the hood” with it only deepens my fascination.

How did I get turned on to it? At 17, I was convinced my destiny was to be a scholar of early music (the catch-all term for European art music before Bach). I studied the Renaissance lute in college. (When anyone asked my folks what their son was studying at UCLA, they’d reply: “Lute. He’s going to be a shepherd.”)

I switched to a composition major in grad school, and haven’t owned a lute in decades. But years later, when I decided to focus on fingerstyle electric guitar playing, I instinctively adopted something like a lutenist’s right-hand technique. It’s not terribly different from classical guitar technique, except that I almost never use a classical guitarist’s “rest strokes” (bringing a finger to rest on an adjacent string after plucking). Also, while a classical guitarist tends to play melodies with alternating index and middle fingers, I usually play them with alternating thumb and index finger, lute-style. (You can take the boy out of the Renaissance Faire, but you can’t…)

The chateau was a peaceful place — while Courtney was asleep.

Funny epilogue: Ten years ago I was trying to record a Courtney Love album at a beautiful chateau in Southern France, the same studio where Floyd tracked The Wall. We weren’t far from Avignon, where this music may have originated. One night at dinner Courtney injected some casual comment about 14th-century compositional techniques. She may have gleaned it from Richard Hostatder’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. Or she may have just been fucking with me. (Reading up on you online so she can “casually” drop a mind-blowing comment into a conversation is very much Courtney’s style.) That led to a discussion of French poetry, and the studio manager recalled with admiration the way Robert Smith used to sit around that same table reciting symbolist poetry — in the original French, of course — while the Cure was recording Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me. Occasionally rock stars are really smart.

The studio went under soon after, largely because Courtney neglected to pay her astronomical bills. Today the chateau, studio, and winery are the country estate of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. I wonder if they ever discuss 14th-century counterpoint and the ars subtilior.

P.S.: If you’re curious about this remarkable juncture in history, check out Barbara Tuchman’s classic A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, a riveting history book suitable for general readers.

The post 14th-Century Freakout! appeared first on tonefiend.com.

Lon Chaney was an early Fuzz Face user.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a guitarist in possession of a single Face Fuzz must be in want of cool Fuzz Face mods. (Sorry, Jane.)

Case in point: The comments section for the new Fuzz Face project.

We’re far from the first to cover this ground. In fact, I should have mentioned a couple of great articles on Fuzz Face mods. We’ve talked about the technique of using sockets in your build so you can audition multiple components. Years ago DIYer Gary Burchett took this notion to its logical conclusion with the Multi-Face, a Fuzz Face with most of the components socketed. It’s definitely worth trying this. Meanwhile, this Instructables project by randofo explains how to create a super-versatile Fuzz Face using switchable components.

Trust me — despite the simplicity of the circuit and the sheer number of adventurous souls who have deconstructed and reconstructed it, it’s hard not to play around with it and find something cool and new. That too is a truth universally acknowledged!

The post The Fuzz of a Thousand Faces appeared first on tonefiend.com.

You can purchase a kit, or source your own parts.

The Fuzz Face has inspired countless spinoffs since Ivor Arbiter unveiled the device in 1966. Some introduced meaningful improvements. Many didn’t.

The goal of this project, created by my friend Mitchell “Super-Freq” Hudson, is to create a pedal very similar to the original. It’s a great way to explore one of the iconic sounds of ’60s rock (and lots of ’60s-influenced rock).

The instructions are available here. [19MB PDF.]

You can order a kit from Mammoth for $45. (Disclosure: Neither tonefiend nor super-freq has any financial stake in these kits. I simply asked the Mammoth guys to create one for your parts-sourcing convenience. All necessary parts are readily available from other vendors.)

But before you attempt the project, please be aware of some of its quirks. (And if you’re curious, you can read about how I customized the pedal I used in my video demo.)

Vero board vs. perfboard. This project differs from all previous tonefiend projects in that the circuit is assembled on vero board rather than perfboard. On perfboard, the holes are coated in conductive material, but none of the holes are electronically linked — you must make all connections yourself. On vero board, each row of holes (or column, if rotate the board 90 degrees) is connected by a strip of conductive material.

Each board type has its advantages. Vero board circuits often require less soldering, and you usually don’t have to spend as much time finessing the rat’s nest of wires on the reverse side of the board. However, vero layouts can be tricky to visualize. With pertboard, you can can often just replicate the layout of the schematic. On vero, the layout can have maze-like complexity.

Vero builds are fun, and you should definitely try a few. (I made my first DIY pedals on vero, though I usually use perfboard for prototyping these days.) If you enjoy solving visual puzzles, you’ll definitely have a blast. If that sounds like a nightmare to you, you might prefer a Fuzz Face project that comes with a printed circuit board, such as BYOC’s excellent $95 ESV Vintage Fuzz.

I made a no-knob version. (Details below.) I decorated it with these stickers.

There are no sonic differences between the two approaches. They’re simply two ways of getting to the same place. I happened to make my demo model from perfboard. (Details below.)

Negative ground vs. positive ground. Almost all modern effects use negative-ground wiring. But for the sake of historical accuracy, this build, like many ’60s effects, uses positive ground. It’s not any more difficult to assemble positive-ground circuits — really, the only differences are that polarized parts are inserted in reverse, and the battery’s positive and negative terminals get connected to the circuit board in reverse. But there’s one important consequence: You can’t power the pedal with a conventional power supply. And even if you have a reverse-ground cable and/or power supply, you can’t use any those multi-outlet power supplies that daisy-chain pedals together (unless every other pedal in the chain is positive-ground, and that’s pretty unlikely).

That’s why this kit includes no AC adapter jack. It sucks to burn through batteries for both economic and ecological reasons. But this particular circuit has an extremely low current draw — it’ll run for months and months on a single battery, and will still sound cool as the battery weakens.

No modern conveniences. The project also omits other modern innovations, such as a pull-down resistor on the input (which can minimize switch noise) and a capacitor between +9v and ground (which can prevent high-frequency noise and radio interference). You can certainly add those if you like. But we decided to go minimal. For better or worse, you’ll have an authentic ’60s experience. The sole nod to modern wiring is a true-bypass switch.

Germanium vs. silicon. This is all germanium, baby. Which translates into a warm, thick, dynamic tone. But it’s a loose, sometimes flabby type of distortion, not suitable for modern metal. If you prefer a louder, tighter, brighter sound, you can use silicon. (Mitchell likes silicon 2N3904s in this circuit. Others recommend BC-108s and BC-109s because they appeared in early silicon Fuzz Faces. My opinion: germanium only, unless you have the time, skill, and patience to play with all the values in the circuit to get the best sound from silicon transistors.)

PNP vs. NPN. Since this is a positive-ground circuit, it requires PNP-style transistors. Even though positive-ground hasn’t been used much since the ’60s, you still encounter many new PNP Fuzz Faces, mainly because there’s a much greater supply of vintage PNP transistors. In fact, many germanium pedal projects (including this site’s Fiendmaster, a Rangemaster derivative) use wiring tricks to deploy PNP transistors in modern, negative-ground circuits, just because those transistors have been easier to acquire. But now we’re seeing new-production germanium transistors, such as the ones used in current BYOC kits and sold by parts suppliers such as Mammoth — which means NPNs are suddenly much easier to acquire.

I’ve had great luck with these new-production transistors. And unlike 40+-year-old transistors, you don’t have to go through bags of them to find good ones.

Transistor selection. You’ll find online claims that certain transistor models are essential to get the most out of the circuit. I couldn’t disagree more. After extensive studio experimentation with many transistor types, I’ve concluded that there’s not much sonic difference between properly performing germanium transistors. (Example: I had the opportunity, under exacting studio conditions, the compare the $95 BYOC ESV Fuzz and a $600 British boutique pedal I won’t name that boasts the “definitive” NOS transistors. They two pedals weren’t just similar in sound — they were identical.) However, unlike with most modern components, you can still encounter variation from transistor to transistor, so it may help to audition multiples. (If a newly purchased transistor sounds defective, reputable suppliers will replace it.)

The Mammoth kits includes two AC-128s, the most commonly available PNP transistors. They sound awesome in this circuit.

Other components. Resistor and capacitor values matter, but their composition does not. There’s no harm in using pricy carbon-comp resistors or vintage capacitors for “mojo” or period accuracy, but there are no sonic advantages to doing so. (And I challenge all anyone to provide repeatable audio evidence to the contrary.)

To LED or not to LED. The advantages of an LED are obvious: You can tell whether the thing is on before you start playing! On the other hand, it’s easier to build the pedal without an LED. Omitting it greatly extends battery life. Originals didn’t have LEDs. And hey — I’ve played countless gigs with no-LED fuzzes such as the Z. Vex Fuzz Factory and Prescription Electronics Experience, and somehow survived.

Playing with others. More than any other circuit I can think of, the Fuzz Face performs differently according to the effects you combine it with. It hates buffers — placing a buffer (or buffered effect, such as most Boss or Ibanez pedals) before the Fuzz Face yields a thin, harsh sound. Fuzz Faces almost always sounds best first in the signal chain. Also, they probably shine brightest with vintage-output pickups. (I don’t own any active-pickup guitars, but I suspect the Fuzz Face sounds dreadful with them.) Some say the Fuzz Face works best with single-coils, and the best-known Fuzz Face users are Strat players. But I also dig how it sounds with vintage-style humbuckers. (And remember — the Tone Bender Mk1 is really just a Fuzz Face. So Mk 1 user Mick Ronson, for example, was basically just plugging a Les Paul into a Fuzz Face — to spectacular effect!)

My Fuzz Face build. I built my demo model on perfboard, and simplified it even further. Since I prefer to control the gain from the guitar, I replaced the gain knob with a board-mounted 1k trimpot. (And next time, I’ll just use a 1k or 1.5k resistor.) I also omitted the volume control, because I feel the effect sounds best hitting the amp at maximum level. It’s not a particularly loud fuzz, so I rarely feel a need to tame the level.

Here are the guts of my perfboard Fuzz Face. The tone is identical to the vero board version.

Summary. Every adventurous electric guitarist should probably own a good Fuzz Face, and this project is a great way to acquire one. But I only recommend the project if you can get behind its minimalist/retro attitude. If you desire modern circuitry, higher gain, or rare mojo parts, consider alternatives. A vintage Fuzz Face is a wild, often unpredictable effect, best approached with a spirit of adventure and a sense of humor.

Recommended reading:

• R.G. Keen’s 1998 article “The Technology of the Fuzz Face” has inspired countless boutique and DIY Fuzz Faces.

• This Fuzz Central article traces the evolution of the effect and includes great photos of the interiors of vintage units.

Maximum thanks to Mitchell Hudson for creating this project. Do yourself a favor and check out his cool DIY site.

The post The “Super-Fiend” DIY Fuzz Face! appeared first on tonefiend.com.

So what’s your take on the Fuzz Face?

I used to hate them — but only because my sole exposure to them was via the crappy reissues of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. They sounded so brittle and harsh! Not till this century did I encounter the pedal in its original incarnation.

What a difference!

Vintage-style Fuzz Faces produce tones that are warm, rich, and unbelievably dynamic. It was like the first time I tasted a vintage-style daiquiri. Like the Fuzz Face, the classic daiquiri is a delicate concoction made from a few simple yet complexly interactive ingredients — nothing like those nasty blended drinks that taste like Slurpees spiked with Everclear.

Here’s everything I love about vintage Fuzz Faces, compressed into 60 seconds:

My DIY version is based on inventor Ivor Arbiter’s original 1966 schematic. That’s also the basis for a new DIY project created by my stompbox-buildin’ pal Mitchell Hudson, who runs the cool DIY site Super-Freq. We’ll both be posting it on our sites in the next few days. You can source the parts on your own, or order a kit for less than $50 — not as cheap as some of our other DIY projects, thanks to its two relatively pricy germanium transistors.

Most lore about “mojo” stompbox parts is utter nonsense, but there is something harmonically unique about the germanium transistors used in ’60s fuzz pedals, including original Fuzz Faces. (See my “Germanium Mystique” post/rant for more info.) You don’t need germanium for a good fuzz sound — there are many great tones available via silicon transistors, integrated circuits, and digital modeling. But one problem with those god-awful Fuzz Face reissues was that they often simply substituted high-gain silicon transistors for germanium ones without modifying anything else in the circuit. The result was more gain, but at the cost of harsh, excessively bright tones and inferior dynamic response.

In the last decade or so, builders have wised up. Numerous manufacturers offer authentic ’60s-style replicas. Meanwhile, the DIY community has created countless variations, many of which use post-germanium parts to great effect. These days it’s pretty easy to find a Fuzz Face that doesn’t suck.

I’ve build many Fuzz Face variants, but until Mitchell created his Fuzz Face project, I’d never done a strict original, with positive-ground wiring, PNP transistors, and few latter-day “refinements.” (Don’t sweat it if those terms mean nothing to you — they’re all explained within the project.)

Anyway, that’s the circuit you hear in the video above. It’s not a fuzz for all seasons — it doesn’t have a ton of gain, and its loose, spongy distortion is unsuitable for metal and modern hard rock. But I love its warm, non-macho timbre and phenomenal dynamic response. It’s simple, classic, and delicious, much like this.

The post Fuzz Face:
The Daiquiri of Distortion Pedals? appeared first on tonefiend.com.

This is the sound you’ve been searching for!

If you like reading about internet memes that have just passed their sell-by date, tonefiend is the place to be!

Witness this brief video on triggering goat sound via guitar, created in a fit of desperation when a planned DIY post was delayed divine inspiration.

It’s based, of course, on the unbelievably popular video of unbelievably weird goats making unbelievably human-like sounds. It’s inspired countless spinoffs, including mine. I made these in my hotel room in Frankfurt during Musikmesse, feeling grateful the entire time that I live in an era when you can do crap like this in a German hotel room at midnight. Because trust me, there weren’t a lot of alternatives.

Tech details: homemade Strat, Fishman TriplePlay, Apple MainStage software hosting NI’s Kontakt sampler, goats.

Do you too wish you had guitars that yell like goats that yell like humans? Grab the raw samples here, or download this Kontakt Instrument, which should play just fine using using the free Kontakt Player.

And yes — that new 100% retro-analog DIY project will be here SOON! :)

The post Guitars That Yell Like Goats That Yell Like Humans appeared first on tonefiend.com.

But while there’s more to life than MIDI, for the last few months my particular life has been all MIDI, all the time. I worked on the documentation for the Fishman TriplePlay MIDI guitar system, then demoed the product at MacWorld and Musikmesse. And now that the smoke has cleared and I’m off the Fishman clock, I’m still obsessed with the musical possibilities here. In fact, I’m just getting to the fun part: bending the technology to taste and making weird-ass music for weird-ass people compelling new sounds.

I’m posting two new pieces spun off from my Musikmesse demos. Technical and musical comments after the videos.

In my first TriplePlay demo, I used simple, recognizable acoustic instrument samples. For the second one, I focused on aggressive/distorted sounds. But now I’m getting into what really interests me: solo guitar arrangements featuring hybrid colors, deployed so that it’s often difficult to tell the guitar sounds from the synths and samples.

It’s not the best approach for demoing the technology, since it’s admittedly tough to tell what the hell is going on. But right now it’s sparking my imagination in a way that makes me want to leap out of bed in the morning and explore the guitar, much the way I used to feel as a pre-teen back in Çatalhöyük, the neolithic Anatolian city where I was born in 6,000 B.C. (Or at least that how it feels after several trans-Atlantic flights and many eight-hour playing days.)

Anyway, I’m using the same gear setup picture here. It’s still working well for me, or at least as well as any setup that involves putting a frickin’ laptop onstage can be expected to work. The real fun has been the sound design, especially combining timbres from favorite sound libraries with “organic” guitar tones.

“Paneer,” named after the Hindi work for cheese, is an attempt to integrate guitar with modern electronic sounds, though more than anything else, it reminds me of some discarded Timbaland track from around 2001. (At least I made it into the current century!) The bass and sitar sounds are both 50/50 blends of sample and dry electric guitar. I always loved the sound of octave-doubled bass and guitar on old vintage R&B tracks, and it’s gratifying to mimic the effect while playing solo. The bass and sitar sounds are from the NI Kontakt library, as are the drum samples. The weird, swelling sounds that enter around 1’30″ are from a cool sample library by 10Soundware‘s Daisuke Fuchigami. Among other things, composer Fuchogami performs using mixer feedback as his solo tone generator, and I dig the weird yet organic qualities of his libraries. In the section starting at 2’10″, where my hands are out of sync with the sounds, I’m using MainStage’s Tru-Tape Delay plug-in, set to reverse everything I play one bar after I play it. The guitar sounds with those weird, high overtones are analog signals processed using various gizmos in Reaktor.

“Cathode Ray Blues” was an experiment to see whether I could use the MIDI/digital stuff to create trashy/funky/swampy sounds — you know, exactly the colors that don’t come to mind when you hear the words “MIDI guitar.” As a middle-aged white guy, I have a particular abhorrence of middle-aged-white-guy bar-band blues, so I simply had to fuck things up expand the palette. I turned to retro-tech colors: The vaguely harmonica-like sound at 0’39″ blends analog guitar with Stylophone samples from Precision Sound. I like the way the sample doesn’t track the pitch of the bent note — they rub together in a deliciously harsh fashion. The distant, synth-like sound playing the Howlin’ Wolf lick is a blend of guitar and the Cathotron sampler/synth from Hollow Sun, one of my fave soundware companies. The glitches in the broken-sounding solo are from MainStage’s Monster Fuzz plug-in, which can simulate mis-biased transistors. The blown-out drums were made using FXpansion’s BFD2.

DISCLOSURE: Apple, Fishman, and FXpansion are clients of mine, but no one paid me to make or post these videos.

The post MIDI Guitar Meltdown appeared first on tonefiend.com.

My pal Jeff Cross from Apple sent me a brief email:

please tell me you’ve seen these…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSsl1h8RhqU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT7bsX2qNWQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC170m-Hcyg

No, I had not. And they’re soooo good. All three are from YouTube user MotorGoblin. I don’t know anything about him, beyond the fact that he’s clever, funny, and very musical.

Anyone have any similar techniques to share? (I’ve been meaning to do a post on my “plastic tube Leslie”…)

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