First Steps Taken?

Last week I finally stopped hemming and hawing, and did some recording with the intention of sending it out. Set up my pedals, my amp, my mic, my laptop. Wrote down my plan for the recording. Practiced it a few times. Recorded it once, and realized I messed it up, the input being set to my laptop's internal mic rather than my SM-57 and SM-58. Tried it again. Got it.

gemini://tilde.club/~winter/pixelart/1bp_stompbox.png

Last year I reconnected with one of my old friends, who I'm happy to say hasn't changed a bit: he's still pursuing his weird and beautiful art (visual, aural) a couple cities away - where I live, that's about a five and a half hour drive. When we got talking, he asked if I was making anything ambient/experimental/droning. I said that I wasn't, but I was maybe planning to, and he replied that he'd love to hear anything, doesn't have to be releasable, even just experiments.

So I sent it off last Saturday. Sent him a Google Drive link, and he said thanks, he'd bump it up his listening list, can't wait. Maybe he'll listen to it, maybe not - that's not the point for me. For me, the point was to get out of my comfort zone, get past the paralysis, and make something. Anything. And I did: a slowly darkening and washing-out loop, four notes finger picked on my semi-hollowbody, looped through my Boss RC-1 and treated by a variety of pedals: vibrato, lo-fi flutter, tremolo, fuzz and reverb. Playing with knobs once the loop began, to get the idea of something unstable and changing.

This isn't the first piece like this I've been playing with: I'd also been playing around with harmonics pushed up an octave via my Boss OC-5, which, with reverb, sounds strange and ethereal. Maybe that's next. Something I learned a long time ago with software development: to get back into things quickly, leave something a little loose, something to get you started the next time you sit down.

gemlog