Podcast #1: Chamber Guitar (Sketch)

I’m trying something new starting with this week’s podcast. I’m going to see if this blog can coax me into writing more music on a regular basis. Each week I’ll be working on a sketch and posting whatever I’ve got on Sunday nights. The plan is to rotate sketches so on Monday I start working on a different one (either a new one, or once I have a few in the hopper, back to a previous one). I’ve jotted down some ideas for future sketches so I have a bit of a roadmap for the next few weeks. The idea is to create a deadline for myself, which I will keep to for fear of disappointing my (as of yet imaginary) audience. Keep in mind that although I’m posting this publicly, if it says Sketch in the title of the post, it’s a very rough draft and a lot will probably change in the final version.

This week’s sketch is tentatively titled Chamber Guitar for no good reason other than all the sounds will be produced by the various stringed instruments laying around the house (I thought there’d be a play on the word chamber too, but so far it just makes it sound fancier than it is). I’m playing with a method I’ve used with some success in the past, which is to simply sit down and imagine the piece before I start playing, and just write a verbal description of what’s in my head. Here’s my description for this piece:

Chamber Guitar Verbal Description

Lush, ethereal wash in background with slow but directed harmonic motion. Low, dull thud begins defining pulse (like a kick drum). Metallic scraping sounds, with some reversed flitter over the top, moving across the stereo field. A chorus of hammer-ons, in twos and threes, at first randomly distributed in space and time lock into a hocketing pattern, eventually defining a theme. These recede into harmonics, played by various guitars, which give way to a massive, sustained sound, with a slow attack and some distortion (mixed with reversed recording?), playing a melismatic, sometimes pitch-bending, melody based on the theme earlier expressed by the hammer-ons.

A bass line forms below. A texture of percussion fades in to join the thuds, with interesting eq (suggest snippets of these at the beginning). The massive sustained sound thins out and the hammer-ons return, this time building into hocketing chords. The percussive texture thins and the scraping metallic stuff comes back in. Focus again on the ethereal wash and the thud, which have been transformed by the previous interjections. Encore of the big sound and all the percussion to finale.

Notes:

1. Hammer-ons may be also combined with single staccato plucks.
2. Start the piece rising. Middle is combined rising and falling. End is falling only… maybe.
3. They may chain together to form melodic fragments (but no single track has the whole fragment).
4. They may overlap to form momentary chords, which are related to the ethereal chordal texture.
5. They slip in and out of being easily recognizable as guitars.
6. Bass line is pitched down guitars.
7. The ethereal wash is slowly, gradually evolving throughout the entire piece, but always recognizable.

This week I’ve sketched out some of the first paragraph. It’s a lot more jazz fusion / prog rock that I was going for, but there you have it. I imagined more of a glitchy electronica texture with the big electric guitar sound more like a guitar solo in a Radiohead song whose title escapes me at the moment. Well, on to next week…

 Chamber Guitar [1:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download