Overrocker
By onezero on May 3, 2026 11:28 pm
This week included (as usual) an hour and a half of ambient improvisation, finalizing a collection of this year's Weekly Beats pieces so far, a Friday-evening ambient improvisation (not yet released), and (today) a rehearsal for a show in a couple weeks.
That seems like a lot when I type it out. So I had one tracking session Saturday evening for this, and on a whim selected the Kalamazoo KG-2, tuned D F# C# E F# A. (I still have to level those frets and swap out the too-level bridge, so I can approximate that 7 1/4" fretboard radius.) Apart from having to avoid certain parts of the fretboard, it worked reasonably well, after I tightened down the pickguard again.
This guitar lends itself to thrashing around, which leads to that channel of droning on open strings while I slide around a cluster of fretted notes. (I did, after all, use this guitar for a few Glenn Branca sessions back in the day, so thrashing is in its history.) Some of these rhythm parts got pretty long in tracking; I wasn't inclined to stop at the end of a measure.
There are three tracks of Kalamazoo: neck pickup on the left, bridge pickup on the right, both pickups in the center. I felt too lazy to patch in the Colourbox, so it's direct into the UA Volt, with the "vintage" tone circuit on. I didn't worry too much about overloading, since this A/D clips nicely. (I also used the usual send to a convolution reverb, and the usual compression/eq/limiting arrangement on the stereo mix.)
The results...seem pretty decent. I'm fond of that one section in the middle (~ 1:36), so let it go on a bit longer than some of the others. After uploading, I found a few places where before-the-bar note attacks were cut off in editing, and restored them. While I was at it, I boosted everything a dB, and mixed up the reverb send a bit. So now it's more correct.
This really does have a stronger rock feeling than I've used in the last few weeks. Maybe I'm overselling it here with this title, but Mount Overrocker's highest point is 644 m.
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