Mixed Methods: A Guided Improvisation for Guitar, Bass and Prepared Tapes. Live Looping in Reaper.

Here's a little something I've cooked up.

The title refers to the fact that I'm playing live (and using a looper to record parts) as well as using what I'll call 'prepared tapes'.

There's a kind of frippertronic loop which reouccurs a couple of times over the intro. As well as that I did a string arrangement which makes itself known a couple of times over.

I made a basic arrangement then used Super 8 to layer up sections with different guitar sounds. I'll be doing a further Super 8 tutorial in the next couple of days outlining this method. I set up a MIDI track with trigger keys to export the loops firstly and then do various combinations of playing them in reverse and also halving the duration which gives an effect I like of ostinatos which become more insistent.

Guitar wise given the key I found myself falling into myxolidian territory with the country style bends that come with the territory.
I'm fascinated by the way that when you reverse country style guitar it sounds like a psychedelic oriental intrument. Like country music is the inverse of indian music. Country and eastern if you like. Of course there's the fact that most astronauts were, in the 70s apparently listening to Country music. Brian Eno and David Lanois made usage of the instrument for their Ambient Apollo album.

Given the fact that I was layering guitars things ended up taking on a kind of African Highlife or even Cocteau Twins vibe (I guarantee you don't want to hear my trying to sing like Liz Frasier though).

I wrote the string arrangement cherrypicking all the best articulations from my raggedy collection.

Regular viewers may have been confused by my video last week, which was totally sequenced and orchestral. This was part of me learning wome of the basic principles of orchestration so that when I want i can drop a string arrangement into things. And one of those times was now, this is partly what I mean in the title by guided improvisation.

One of the reasons it's nice to play with other people is that you can bounce ideas off each other. What one person plays influences the choices that the other makes. Making a part beforehand is like a unidirectional version of this. At the very least it stops you falling back on playing E major straight away.

The Bass enters at about three minutes in, I had another instance of Super 8 set up just to record the repeating bass riff.

and then it was back to guitar. I had Super 8 kill all the tracks at a certain point and I again layered up three tracks with their different guitar sounds.

Incidentally I used three of @airwindows amp sims. Much lighter on CPU than say amplitube. Eadch channel had different effects (one with ADT, another echo, and the last a combination of the two). It was of course all these effects and a clean single coil pickup that give it the whole dream pop thing.

While building the project I actually had a lot more in mind the styles of Richard Thompson and the late Tom Verlaine. That slightly irregular and jerky form of playing doesn't really lend itself to looping, chromatic notes tend to jut out. If anyone's interested in what scale I was playing around in then that's the 'Dickie Betts' scale of hexatonic myxolidian to give it it's full name. It's a major pentatonic with an added minor seventh. It gets it's name from the guitarist of the same name who was in the Allman Brothers and used it very well.

So there we have it, a chilled out spacerock country tinged dreampop looping session with an oriental sounding string section.

Thanks for watching, listening, reading.

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Take care until soon when I'll be posting up a how to on some of the techniques I used to make this (for the reaper geeks). I particularly like the method of morphing between guitar sounds, but that's for next time.