Eff me, he’s just soooo good.
David Torn just posted a recording of a stupendous looped improv recorded with my Filth pedal. I’m speechless with admiration.
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Tag: looping
I was polishing up my solo solo version of this lesser-known Mancini tune, and I was reminded once again of the late composer’s genius. Sure, we all know he was a great tunesmith and brilliant orchestrator. But the deeper you dig into his compositions, the more remarkable things you uncover.
Even though Mancini worked exclusively in pop idioms, I rank Hank as one of the 20th century’s greatest composers. Everything he composed seems to have some remarkable and unlikely compositional twist, even the best-known tunes we take for granted. Consider the slippery chromaticism and crunchy minor-3rd modulations of the Pink Panther theme. Or the familiar “Baby Elephant Walk” melody — if you take a step back, you realize how bizarre it is, rocketing up as an arpeggio before leaping down to a dissonant note. It’s also easy to forget how shocking the Peter Gunn theme was, with those violent dissonant accents, not to mention its unprecedented fusion of brainy Stan Kenton harmonies and greasy guitar rock. (Jobim is the only parallel I can draw in terms of writing wildly original chromatic themes that somehow become universally beloved pop melodies.)
This song is Mancini’s take on the exotica style created by the likes of Martin Denny and Les Baxter. (Mancini was far too tasteful to include exotica’s signature big-call effects, but I lack such restraint.) But check out the cool melody and the way is straddles the underlying harmonies:
We’re in A minor, but no A notes appear in the main melody. Instead, the tune lingers on the 9th, emphasizing B over the Am7 chord and E over the Dm7. Eventually an A does appear — but not till the downbeat of the B second, by which point we’ve embarked on a long, twisted trail of chromatic modulation.
My Mancini obsession goes way back. In the ’90s, I was privileged to play in Oranj Symphonette, a jazz group lead by cellist Mat Brubeck (yeah, Dave’s son) that also included peerless keyboardist Robbie Burger, mad multi-instrumentalist Ralph Carney, and drum titan Scott Amendola (later replaced by the equally awesome Pat Campbell). Sadly, our two Rykodisc albums are out of print, but there’s buttloads of our stuff on YouTube.
Damn, I miss that band. Reunion, anyone?
For a while I’ve been playing this loop-based cover of Foster the People’s “Pumped-Up Kicks” at solo gigs and with my duo band, Mental 99. At risk of sounding like a pompous dick, I’ve annotated the performance, highlighting techniques I’ve found useful for making loop-based performances livelier and less predictable.
I’ve covered some of this ground before, particularly in this Premier Guitar looping-technique article. But here I call out the techniques mid-performance, and I’ve included a few new ones. I hope you find some of them useful.
Likewise, I’ve already written about my live looping rig, but it’s changed a bit since then, and I’ve recently integrated a Universal Audio Apollo Twin interface (plus the stellar plug-ins it allows me to run). An updated overview:
The arrangement perform nicely, and I dig the individual components. But I dislike the system’s Rube Goldberg complexity—it’s a royal pain to set up and schlep. I’m always looking for ways to simply. (Other than, you know, just plugging the guitar into a frickin’ amp.) I’m open to suggestions for streamlining!
This one’s a labor of love: Premier Guitar just published my live looping lesson. Included are most of the hard-won looping techniques I’ve acquired over the last few years. I crashed and burned 100 times onstage so you don’t have to! 😉
The 20 audio clips embedded in the article were trickier than usual to prepare. Ordinarily when I record music mag demos, it’s simply a matter of plugging in a guitar, amp, or pedal and noodling around while trying to make it sound good. But here I had to demonstrate techniques that unfold over time, which is harder than it sounds, at least for me. But I’m reasonably satisfied with how they turned out.
My emphasis throughout is going beyond looping cliches and defying listener expectations. That too is difficult — by definition, loops are predictable! But I’ve been racking my brain for years, trying to come up with ways to bust out of the usual patterns. Most of my ideas appear here. Hope you find them useful!
I’m thrilled to bits about a show I’m playing Thursday eve in San Francisco featuring two guitarists of impeccable skill and taste, plus me.
Teja Gerken and I are co-hosting a monthly solo guitar night at El Rio, my groovy neighborhood dive.Our guest is the amazing Eric Skye who, among other things, plays gorgeous solo guitar versions of classic Miles Davis tunes. If you happen to be in cold, cold San Francisco this week, stop by and say hi!
I’ve been doing the digital looping thing with Mental 99 for a few years now, and man, trying to work out solo arrangements with live-looped MIDI drums has been seriously humbling. You know all those jokes we love about how drummers speed up, slow down, drool, and generally disappoint? I can do all those things and everything else a drummer does, except occasionally play a competent groove. Some of the problems have to do with MIDI tracking in general, and some are simply general suckage. Man, it sure makes me appreciate my brilliant musical partner Dawn Richardson, who never speeds up and drools only rarely.
But those who can’t, teach. So I whipped up a little tutorial on playing drums with MIDI guitar. The first half covers the moves, and the second half features a live improv based on my fave afrobeat pattern. (Tony Allen is my rhythm god.) It also includes some of the hybird synth/guitar sounds I’ve been exploring, like double single-not lines an octave lower, mixing trashy guitar and trashy organ, and of course, space pigeons. (I stole the organ line from my pal Robin Balliger.)
In other news: I’ve been speaking to the ultra-knowledgable Rob Hull from Tube Depot about creating a minimalist DIY amp kit inspired by our conversations here. Lots more details to come. Tube Depot has a track record of making real nice amp kits, and Rob’s documentation/build instruction are the best in the biz. I reviewed their cool tweed Champ clone kit here.
Oh — anyone score any good holiday presents yet?
Okay, I promise: tonefiend is not going to become an all-digital blog. I’ve got two new DIY analog pedal projects in the pipe, plus a piece on that delightfully retro technology, the book.
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.
For the first Fishman TriplePlay demo I posted last month, I featured pretty, naturalistic acoustic sounds. This time around I went for something a little less polite.
I’ve been having a blast — albeit a humbling blast — trying to play real-time drum parts from the guitar. I still suck if it’s much more complicated than what I play here, but I can imagine learning to do it well. It’s also fun using the guitar to access the big keyboard sound libraries I’ve built over the years. Perhaps most exciting of all are the hybrid guitar/synth/sample sounds I’m starting to develop. (There aren’t any in this demo — the sounds are either samples or processed guitar, though I blur the lines with guitar-ish samples and guitars processed to sound like machinery. Next time, though, I’ll try to showcase some of those unholy hybrids.)
Here’s how the setup looks from my perspective. (I’m not trying to be secretive about what’s on the floor — it’s just hard to fit into the frame, even with a wide-angle lens.)
- Homemade strat with Fishman controller/pickup. MIDI transmitted wirelessly.
- MacBook Pro running Apple’s MainStage software. I use a ridiculous number of plug-ins and some ridiculously huge sample libraries. My main sampler is NI Kontakt.
- Focusrite Scarlett interface. All the prosumer interfaces sound pretty decent to me these days, though I like the fact that this one isn’t made out of cheapo plastic.
- Boomerang III looper. I love its ergonomics and smooth looping points. I screw up my loop points constantly, but I have fewer disasters with the Boomerang than with anything else I’ve tried.
- Boomerang Sidecar. Basically just extra buttons for the Boomerang so you can access more features without reprogramming it or performing awkward foot moves.
- Keith McMillen SoftStep MIDI controller. Powerful, rugged, feather-light, and not too expensive.
- Logidy UMI3. A nice, rugged, and inexpensive USB MIDI controller — just to have a few extra switches.
- Generic controller pedal. Its role varies from patch to patch. It might be a mod wheel, a pan pot, a fader, a filter cutoff control, etc.
- Piles of crap. These magically materialize every time I start messing with this stuff.
Just to be clear — these sounds are from my collection, and are not included with TriplePlay. Also, I used TriplePlay in “simple mode” for this video — in other words, I’m not using the dedicated TriplePlay application, but simply using TriplePlay as a generic MIDI controller to trigger sounds loaded into MainStage.
BTW, I’m about to head out for Musik Messe in Frankfurt, Germany, where I’ll be demoing this contraption. Oddly, I’ve never been to this vast musical instruments show, which has been described as a much larger NAMM show with more sausage, beer, and accordions. I’ll be sure to tell you about any cool stuff I see!
DISCLOSURE: Fishman, Apple, and Keith McMillen are among my clients, but no one paid me to make or post this video.
As I gloated last week, Jane Wiedlin gave me her Hello Kitty Stratocaster — the most bitchin’ $99 guitar ever conceived! I finally had a chance to destroy/customize it yesterday, in what will no doubt be the first of many desecrations/enhancements.
I’d ordered one of those Synyster Gates Duncan Invaders with the pretty white pole pieces for the guitar, but just couldn’t wait to experiment, so I browsed through the ol’ pickup collection, and found a nice Duncan Phat Cat I’d used in a Les Paul experiment some months ago.
I don’t generally recommend choosing pickups because of their names, but come on! Kitty + Cat? How could I resist?
Turns out it was a lucky choice. I hadn’t planned to install a pickup that was actually lower in output than the stock humbucker, but it lets me get nicer clean sounds, and coughs up more than enough crunch when goosed with distortion. Speaking of which: the other custom feature is a built-in-distortion circuit activated via push-pull pot (I took lots of pics of the process for a DIY built-in-effects tutorial I’ll be posting very soon.)
View the carnage in this little video. Thanks, Jane Weidlin! Sorry, Stevie Nicks!
My ol’ pals at Guitar Player magazine interviewed me for an instructional article on looping for next month’s issue. It was especially flattering to be invited, because the interviewer was Barry Cleveland, a fine guitarist and a leading figure in the looping community.
I put together this little video to demo the digital rig I use onstage with my duo band, Mental 99, and I’ve cross-posted it here. It covers software, hardware loopers, looping techniques, and the like. Have a listen.
There are two ways to approach amplifying an acoustic guitar: trying to duplicate the natural sound, only louder, and NOT trying to sound naturalistic at all. This post is about the second approach.
I love playing acoustic through an electric guitar amp (as opposed to a dedicated acoustic amp). True, the tubes and speakers amputate all high frequencies. But if you think of the instrument not as an acoustic guitar, but an idiosyncratic electric variant, it opens up amazing possibilities.
More often than not, I prefer to play acoustic gigs that way. I did a fun benefit show last year playing rock and R&B covers with a band consisting of Flea, Tracy Chapman, and drummer Dawn Richardson. Tracy had a beautiful, ultra-hi-fi acoustic tone, and the ratty, rumbling sound of my acoustic through a small combo was — well, let’s just say it was a very strong contrast.
Admittedly, relatively few players exploit this technique. One notable exception is Daniel Lanois. He’s best known as a producer (U2, Peter Gabriel, Bob Dylan, etc.), but he’s also a phenomenal player who does amazing things with an acoustic guitar, an inexpensive magnetic soundhole mic, and small vintage Fender amps. I’ve watched him play up-close a few times, and he’s incredibly adept at conjuring a variety of tones and controlled feedback from this setup.
It’s definitely a white-knuckle playing experience. You have to listen carefully and nix unwanted feedback with quick damping technique. But it can be so expressive!
I’ll talk more about the technique in a bit. But first, check out this short video demo featuring distortion and other stompbox effects, controlled (and not-so-controlled) feedback, and a lot of awkward twisting and turning as I grapple with the tone: