I bought a cheap guitar in April and have been teaching myself how to play since. Although it’s not particularly avant-garde of me, it is always valuable to learn new things and it has already given me a different perspective as a non-musician.
Playing an instrument takes time. Your fingers hurt, taking mental and physical fortitude. I have so far found it rewarding
The way chords and notes are approached is interesting. The 6 strings mean 6 possible notes a chord, introducing the concept of drone chords, and lower pitch strings allowing for a structural base note that progresses down the line.
Standard and non-standard tunings, open-scales and Nick Drake. Using a chord as a basis for a scale.
I chose to try to learn the guitar for a number of reasons:
- I wanted a physical instrument as an audio source to process effects through (mostly midrange frequencies)
- I’m a fan of guitar music (particularly in the context of shoegaze and earlier post-rock)
- My dad plays the guitar, allowing him to teach me some stuff as well as a bonding activity 🙂
I am a fan of playing instruments unconventionally. I have previously read about extended techniques when it comes to guitar. Earlier in the year, I read about Keith Rowe and the techniques he used. I also read about Glenn Branca who I did not know about before, even though he is very influential. I sometimes like bringing my phone up to the pickups to get electrical interference and then using it as a slide.
The more ambient pieces below were made while having the guitar flat on my bed and occasionally lightly tapping the strings with a flatlined compressor and a bunch of effects in Ableton (Valhalla delay/vintage verb, pedal effect and the same max effect I’ve been using a lot recently).
Here are some examples of a recent improvised/experiment/practice with just guitar and effects (was recorded live in one take so its not mixed all that great):
Don’t feel obliged to listen to them all, I just had to break them up due to the file size limit.
More Ambient
More Guitar, a bit gloomy
An accidental mess of a combination of all these files on top of each other when exported
As is sometimes the way, on listening back to these audio clips, it sounded better at the time of playing/recording it. I could somewhat blame it on these files being compressed mp3s so that I could actually upload them due to the 1o mb upload limit.