Re: OT the Guitar as percussion instrument in Live Looping

[Daryl Shawn <highhorse@mhorse.com>]

This (off) topic is occupying a lot of my explorative practice these 
days...I feel like there's so much more to be uncovered. When doing 
vocal stuff, I'm trying to always incorporate some rhythm to distinguish 
myself from the folkies, and generally I use the thumb as bass drum 
above the strings, the pinky nail as snare below the strings, with the 
other fingers free to do regular strumming. Here's a really short and 
lo-fi clip of a vocal tune using this approach:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_5pzN-o74w

(you can see my need for a better pickup of the percussion...)

There's a San Diego acoustic songwriter named Veronica May who I 
discovered just last week; she tapes a piece of sandpaper to her guitar 
top for a nice scrape. Her arrangements and singing are rather 
eccentric, but her technique is wonderful (she has studied hand 
percussion for quite a few years, which shows).

http://www.myspace.com/veronicamay

I LOVE the rhythmic pick scrape idea. I don't use a pick but I'm going 
to see what I can do with the unused side of my nails.

The Eric Roche stuff is great...I'm sad to hear he's "late", I'd never 
heard his stuff.

Daryl Shawn
www.swanwelder.com
www.chinapaintingmusic.com

> I'll start off with this:
>
> My latest thing is using a very thin pick and really getting good at 
> controlling the
> speed with which I scrape round wound sounds.   Even though they are 
> quite small
> and it takes some work,  it is possible to play individual ridges as 
> groups of
> 16ths, triplet 16ths, 32nd and even 64 notes in either direction of 
> the pick arc.
>
> I was showing a guitar student the other day (he's taking looping and 
> creativity lessons from
> me, not guitar lessons........<blush>) that you can come up with a 
> half a dozen
> completely different timbres using this method.
>
> You can play like a quiro looooooooooong scrape, short scrape, short 
> scrape
> or you can get good and counting the number of ridged and the control 
> them
> rhythmically as bursts of either single notes or doubles or triples or 
> quadruples,
> what have you.
>
> It's very cool and with the judicious use of parametric equalization 
> (and I'm suprised that more
> guitarists don't employ parametrics but that's another thread for the 
> future) you can really
> get great percussion sounds.
>
> Throw in a little double octave pitch bending in either direction and 
> you really can have great drums
> (at least for looping purposes)
>
>