Echo Forest
By onezero on January 4, 2026 10:59 pm
Welcome back, everyone!
For the last few years, I've mostly been doing pieces using multiple tracks of the same guitar, with few or no inline effects. Why? There's the challenge of making things seem interesting without lots of effects, and it exposes the variety of tones available just to fingers. With the same instrument in all channels, pitches will likely be intonated the same way. And it gets me past the labor of plugging a bunch of things in. (Though I have acquired a board I now have pedals on, so that's reduced a lot.) Being able to plug in and go has lowered the barrier to creation in a busy life. That said, there's a consistent struggle against sameness, and I've been pushing against some of the boundaries inherent in this approach.
For this one, I started with the thought of following some dance-oriented electronic forms, and while this wouldn't be mistaken for a dance piece, there's a faster tempo than I'd been using (100 bpm here). And there's a channel that uses an explicit send to Ableton's Echo plugin, as a way of implying faster playing and thickening the note density. There's also a send to a convolution reverb, for "space." (And the usual compression/eq on the stereo mix.)
This one's four tracks of PureSalem Mendiola electric guitar in concert tuning, though some sections have only two and three channels with signal at the same time. I'm trying to balance minimalism and momentum here.
The title comes from VA state route 627, a non-contiguous route that at one point intersects Echo Forest Way, also alluding to the use of the Echo plugin.
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