Djado
By onezero on October 26, 2014 10:49 pm
Last week I stopped by a pedal exchange in town (bring $1 for entry, and a pedal to trade), and I traded a Boss chorus pedal for a really compelling fretless home-made guitar (list price $25, made by Phosphene Audio):
It's a glued-together pine body, some parts from a broken acoustic 12-string, zither tuners, and a miscellaneous humbucker. It's also headless, inspired by Klein. I had to have it.
Messing around with it, I found it kind of wanted an Agadez/desert-rock kind of thing. There's a neat resonance from the light body and the post-bridge strings. So I thought I'd come up with a fake field recording. I recorded a bunch of ostinatos, and kept the ones that seemed to work. Guitar tracks went through Live's Saturator plugin, set to different aggressive settings. Everything got some wooden room reverb to give it a kind of cohesion. It was tricky to find rhythms that worked with this, but once I got the tempo right, it fell into place--lots of 3/4 and 6/4 going on here.
Drums are single-hit samples of an Indian drum I have, a free handclap library, and the tambourine from one of Live's percussion racks. I tried adding fake gimbri, but it didn't sit right. Similarly I tried simulating walking into some place where music was playing, layering some field recording over it, but it wasn't quite convincing. I also at the last minute decided to switch up how I was editing the takes together, and it seems more cohesive now. Extra bonus offset beats in a couple places kicks the drumming energy up a notch.
Title comes from the Djado Plateau in Niger.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike (BY-NC-SA)