Electric Guitar + Modular Synth
By disquiet on January 7, 2018 11:16 pm
I've been using my modular synthesizer as an extended effects pedal for my electric guitar. It's also something of an accomplice, in that it nudges me in directions over which I don’t have full control. When I use a lofi looper, like the Soundmachines UL1, the resulting seam — the clock or pulse of the looper — provides a little glitchy beat, a beat I need to learn to play along to. I spent time adjusting the looper to my taste, and then figuring out a sequence of notes that would accommodate it. I then wanted to fill the guitar part out a bit, so I accomplished this through two means. First, I sent a copy of the incoming guitar line through an echo module, and sent that through a low-pass filter. Second, I did some post-production work: after recording myself playing the guitar through the modular synthesizer, I copied the original audio, nudged it forward a tiny bit along the timeline, added a heavy echo (three seconds), severely lowered the volume, and put it through a serious low-pass filter, so in the end it’s a muffled repeat of the original.
I had planned what I might want to record for my first Weekly Beats piece all week, and then finally sat down and did it over the course of about two hours on Sunday the 7th of January, 2018, as the 4:00pm (California) deadline was coming into view. I want to thank Joshua Saddler (aka ioflow) for encouraging me to try out Weekly Beats this year.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike (BY-NC-SA)
