Yewbarrow
By onezero on January 11, 2026 10:24 pm
Like a lot of my recent output, this uses three tracks of the same guitar--in this case (unlike last week), it's an old Univox Coily hollowbody tuned in fifths and fourths, with a rogue second on top. It's a modified version of John Fahey's C tuning, Bb F Bb F Bb C.
This past week was unusual: most weeks, I do the weekly composition over the weekend, perform a livestream on Monday evening, and take a few days to release that on Bandcamp. This past week, I had an EP emerge from some rehearsals, last week's composition, a bonus livestream from last weekend, the regular livestream...and ended up putting out two additional releases. Kind of excessive.
As I sometimes say, the problem is that there's too much music in the world, and I have resolved to make the problem worse.
So I didn't get traction on this piece until Friday evening. I'd had a drum beat fall into my mind, and recorded it, but Friday night when I picked up the Univox, the melody that appeared (the first one you hear in this piece) didn't match with the drum pattern at all, so the drum pattern had to go. I responded to the fingerpicked pattern with the baritone chords, and something of that off-kilter rhythm reminded me of Polvo, so I trusted it. All the sections I used followed the initial section's 6/4 time signature, though they weren't as off-kilter in rhythmic expression.
The fourth section appears twice, slightly differently. When I recorded it, it felt natural to rest on the first beat, but this felt wrong against the third section, so I moved it to the expected position. The second time it appears, later, the rested "one" is restored, allowing another way to listen. I'd recorded an additional section that I left out--its slow 4/4 feeling didn't match with the rest of the piece.
When I was previewing the mix, I realized it sounded fine without added convolution reverb, so there isn't any of that in the mix. It's pretty dry, but with the hollowbody there's still a bit of air.
The title comes from Yewbarrow Fell in Scotland, which has an elevation of 628m.
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