all acoustic, no effects, no guitar bending... check the 'story behind the song' for explanation
Skipper J Robinson, Esq
Greetings. It's a pleasure.
Sorry about the poor quality and unprofessionality of the recordings and the performances on the recordings. I don't consider these the best I can do by any means, so I hope you won't judge me too harshly. These are pretty much just the takes I got right after writing the songs, recorded hastily so I could move on to something else. I've been trying to write as many songs as possible over the past months. I just wanted to get the ideas out there in the hopes that somebody would like to hear them. I promise I'll do better someday and maybe you'll like to hear those. Please tell me if there's a song here that you'd like to hear a better take of, because that would give me a chance to focus on one. Feel free to tell me I suck, too. I have a fan from Minnesota that keeps me going. No idea who it is.
Story behind the song
There are no electronic effects or guitar-bending going on here. It's all acoustic, done by sync-ing my hand with the resonance of the guitar, waving my hand back and forth over the mouth of the guitar to manipulate the soundwaves. It sounds crazy, I know, but if you'll listen maybe you'll see that I'm being truthful. I have to say, though, that the lossy compression makes it a lot harder to hear, and the studio recording is more believable...
It's an excerpt from Fire On the Mountain when I got an hour in a studio in the spring... I only had an hour and don't have much to show for it. I was still warming up, so the rest of Fire isn't really worth your time, but I wanted people to hear this part. In the spring I was really in the zone and could do this all the time, but I got rattled for a while there and all this pressure I'm putting on myself to write and record new songs these days isn't helping anything. But it pops out once in a while. And I'm sure the zen will come back to my hands soon. The mics I have now don't pick this stuff up, either, really, and there's so much other distortion you'd probably attribute it to that... oh well.
---------------
update: a further/different explanation-
i struck the strings of a guitar with a stick at different harmonic-ish points on the strings, in a rhythm, which is kind of what i do when i play, striking the strings with the thumb and fingers like a slap-bass more often than plucking or strumming... anyway, i could get nearly the same reverb sound out of those strings with the stick, without waving my hand over the mouth of the guitar (though that does magnify and manipulate the effect)... so what's happening i guess is the interlocking of the frequencies of the individual strings reverberations, until the onset of what norm roberts has drawn my attention to , which is called subharmonics. i previously knew the phenomenon as beats between frequencies, which didn't really seem to apply to this discription, but subharmonics does... so anyway, there you go. i still pride myself on drawing these sounds out without effects and electronic manipulations. i still can't figure out why other people don't use them more. i suppose most are obsessed with technical playing and picking here and there so much that they're not allowing the tones to ring out and interlock enough. which is why i'm not a fan of music lessons and western approaches to musicianship. so there.
wait, there's more. the waving of the hand in front of the mouth of the guitar isn't a muting technique, as it may seem at first, uh, read. check it: the waves that are created by the strings resonate through the cavity/body of the guitar before being spat back out of the mouth of the guitar, and they gather up into larger waves, which we can hear sometimes in that wawawa sound which is i suppose subharmonics... but, what i'm trying to say is that if you're receptive enough you can feeel those waves coming out when you wave your hand in front of the mouth, little waves of air, and what you can do, what i like to call acoustical jujitsu, is bat those waves around with your hand. it doesn't have to be especially quick hand-waving, though that's how i first started playing with them. if you fan your hand quickly in front of the mouth, you can do it a little bit, but that's mostly just air being batted around like when you talk in front of a floorfan (tommy boy- luke i am your father stlyle) ... what i've found is that you can actually slow those hand movements down and interlock them with the resonant frequency or the subharmonic frequency until you're not just batting air around, but the swells of the soundwaves themselves. this definitely makes me sound dillusional, but just becuase you can't do it yet doesn't mean i'm crazy. this is the sort of thing jimmy page and electrical players do with effects, and it's like people have given up on acoustical guitars as vehicl
