Enough Is Enough
Back On The MIDI Guitar Again
Man Of Arun – Carnival
Bill the amiable ambient guitarist of YouTube fame has suggested creating backing drones by exciting guitar strings with a window fan. I struggled to record whilst holding my guitar up to the window so had to use a different approach…
Man Of Arun No.3 Amateur Hour
‘Indiecompetent Band’ crosses generations with a riff from 1987 crowbarred into a new song whilst ‘Node’ is mainly a demo from 2009. ‘Rows’ is also new and bringing up the rear is ‘Wickham’ is an edited version of a track from… actually I don’t remember. Hold on while I look it up… 2014.
Guitar Synth Doodle Hardware Edition
The importance of a solid left hand technique highlighted by the need to hold a camera in the other.
A Little Night Music No.1
Combining mucking about with toys and trying to get back to playing things all the way through I’ve knocked out a tune and a video which may become part of a series.
Made up on the night.
Made in the edit was the mistake of including the recording of the backup loop which even by the standards of this series is a bit on the dull side so you may want to skip to 2.20 in.
Features the strangely underrated AdrenaLinn which was doing many of the things recent effects pedals major in getting on for twenty years ago. Not much to note other than perhaps the pedal board splitting part way into two audio paths with the ability to loop either separately which in turn can be captured by the Boss RC50 tacked on the end.
Man Of Arun – Indiecompetent Band (2019)
I’ve been knocking out videos for some of the Bandcamp stuff to stick ’em on YouTube. Just words and chords.
Man Of Arun – Fallen (2019)
A Little Night Music No.2
During which which I finally succeed in recreating the sound of a cheap children’s ‘mooing’ toy using hundreds of pounds worth of equipment.
On an interesting Sound On Sound podcast interviewing a developer of Yamaha’s FM synths they mentioned the FS1R module, one of which I bought around the turn of the century when they were going cheap having not proved popular. On that prompt I looked up what they were being sold for these days and after getting over the shock I dragged mine out for a noodle.
Backing comes courtesy of an Argon 8M and Arturia Microfreak (C’est chic).
Made up on the spot – hard to believe I know.
What I’d forgotten was that the FS1R has the elusive MIDI Mode 4 allowing each string to have its own channel meaning amongst other things better tracking and independent pitch bend. A bit like MIDI Polyphonic Expression does today and allowing you to play in a more guitar like manner. (I may go wild and do a video at some point that demonstrates that rather more obviously than the one here.)
Perhaps of note is that the Yamaha synthesizer and Roland GR33 I’m using to convert the signal from the hexaphonic pickup on the guitar to MIDI are twenty year old technology. (Hexaphonic means it picks up each of the six strings individually for later processing. Some very clever modern pedals and software can work out individual notes from a standard guitar output but there are still some things that can’t be deduced using that method).
The Cyclone II is of similar vintage with some modern accoutrements, most recently Wilkinson WLS130 locking saddles which are a great aid to tuning stability on an old fashioned Fender type of tremolo unit if you’re attempting extreme wobbles. It also has a LSR roller nut, Graphtec string tree and locking tuners I stuck on over a decade ago and can’t remember what they are.
The Cyclone shouldn’t be confused with the Squier reissue which has Stratocaster rather than Jaguar pickups and most importantly lacks the go faster stripes of the original.