It’s a pleasure to work with somebody who has the patience to wade through that morass and use that technology to add value to what I can produce. In the end, it can wind up being more than the sum of its parts. DJSE brings creativity and persistence, as well as a complementary viewpoint which adds the necessary tension to the creative process.
What I can bring to the table is more than 30 years of experience creating music on a variety of instruments, many of which I invented and built myself. This week’s early Saturday session featured two such instruments.
The Electric Dih is something that I invented while still in high school, and the construction of the only exemplar is typical of my function-before-form approach to most things. The Dih is about a foot long, created from a table leg, with 4 steel strings: one bass string, and four identical treble strings which are tuned in unison. The instrument is played by picking or strumming while using the tuning pegs to change the pitch of the uppermost string. The effect is unique, though I reflected today that the Dih may in fact be the closest thing to a physical manifestation of a spiitaarno (the conceptual merging of a piano and a sitar as represented electronically on Car Horns of the Spiitaarno).
The Lindsay guitar is a one-of-a-kind instrument which was a collaboration between myself and luthier John Lindsay of Port Townsend. Created in the mid 1980s, it is essentially a fretless tenor guitar: 4 strings, tuned CGDA like a cello, with a curved fretboard and the scale length of that instrument, but plucked fingerstyle like a guitar. It is an exceptionally quiet instrument, and as such it is difficult to use in a live environment (my one live performance on the instrument was a 1991 duet with fellow guitarist Michael Townsend, which can be heard here). The Lindsay guitar is the bass instrument I played on Arabian Drive, one of the tracks on my 1988 album Introspection.
Today’s effort, with the working title of Truesetto, blends these instruments with electronic drums, bookmarked guitar (my Gibson L6 electric with a paper bookmark laced between the strings at the bridge to produce a muted, marimba-like sound), and trombone accents. We started by recording a raga-like rubato intro on the Lindsay guitar. We gave motion to the rest of the track with an energetic drum loop under two melodic phrases on the Lindsay, played as A and B sections. The bookmarked guitar doubles the B section. The Dih gives extra reinforcement to the B section while also providing an anchoring drone together with the trombone and the bass strings of the Lindsay.
We recorded the Lindsay guitar with a single condenser mic oriented to record from my POV (this is my favorite mic position for recording, as it produces the most accurate reflection of what I hear when I play). The Dih was recorded direct-in. The bookmarked guitar was played clean through my Roland jazz chorus amp, with me sitting on the amp and the mic positioned halfway between the speakers and the bridge of the guitar to capture both the amplified signal and the buzz of the strings against the paper.
We hope to polish up this tune and release a draft on the website in the next few weeks. Until then gentle readers, Namaste and enjoy your week!
