SteelGuitarMusic.com

a Steel Guitar Forum site

Home    CDs    Shopping Cart

Chas Smith  


CD:
Item #CD-CS01A
$17.00
SORRY, out of stock

"An Hour Out of Desert Center"

Chas Smith has been recording ambient music on the Cold Blue label for over 20 years. No other steel guitarist has such a legacy in this "art music" genre, which obscures the boundary between structured harmony and noise. Chas Smith's recordings are like no steel guitar music you have ever heard.

It's actually hard to tell that this music was performed on pedal and lap steel guitars. I asked Chas in email how he made those unusual sounds, and he replied in detail:

How do I make those sounds? Well, basically, everything is constructed from a repetitive pattern, a phrase and it's harmonization, a "texture phrase" (the second cut) and a "rolling chord" (the 4th cut).

The repetitive pattern is: G C E A D F#, a Lydian pattern. I had the top 6 strings of the Bigsby lap guitar tuned to this. I played/recorded this for 5 minutes, open strings. Then I overdubbed it a beat displaced and overdubbed it again another beat displaced. I then recorded the same thing at the 12th fret without damping the strings, so it had the "12th fret ring". Then I turned the guitar around, fretted the guitar at the 12th fret and played the same pattern, but since the guitar was upside down and backwards, the pattern was upside down and backwards (old composition trick and much harder to do on the piano). This is mixed together and becomes the high 'texture' at the beginning of the 3rd cut, the high stuff in the 4th cut as well as the "wind gusts" at the opening of the 1st cut.

The phrase, C B C B G F# C B G F# D A D C B, (at least that's what it was supposed to be) is pretty bare in the 1st cut and it starts about several minutes in. The 'unusual' sounds in the notes are samples I've made of my zithers, steel crotales (discs of varying sizes and thickness' tuned chromatically), the Pez Eater and some of the steel cutters. I have a MIDI pickup on my guitar that triggers an EIV sampler and I've shaped the envelopes of the samples so they "ramp" in behind the picked note on the guitar and "tail" out after the sampler receives the note off. So that phrase is a real time recording. I have the keyboard (QWERTY) in front of the guitar so I can pick a note and then change the preset in the sampler before I pick the next note.

My volume pedal is set up for the normal guitar volume and I machined a coupler and connected the shaft of the volume pot (500k) with the shaft of the CV pot (10k) for the sampler volume so that the volume of the guitar and sampler are matched. The sampler tracks the bar and the sampled note blends with the guitar note so that they sound like they came from the same place.

To make the "long tones", the guitar goes into a M-5000 and cascades through 3 of the "engines", each one being a different kind of delay. The output gets split and one goes out live while the other goes through an Eventide UltraHarmonizer where it's delayed again and has a little filtering and 'spin' put on it, to put some "life" into it.

The "texture phrase" comes from Guitarzilla being "prepared" with rods-on-plates assemblies and titanium rods woven in the strings. Gtzlla has pickups on both ends of the necks. Some where around here I have a photo of a much simpler (4 assemblies) set up. "...Redemption" has Gtz set up with 6 assemblies (66 rods) on the two 10-string necks, three with inconel 625 rods, two with 4130 chrome-moly and one with steel. The phrase is recorded as a single pass in real time. (I recorded about a dozen versions and this was the one I picked).

The "rolling chord" is simply me rolling the bar on the 5-string bass neck (Bb, F, Bb, F, Bb) on Guitarzilla, starting on D and then slowly rolling down to C. This is overdubbed on my Cadillac (very modified Dekley D-12), and again on the Super Pro. So the 4th cut starts as a D Mixolydian structure and resolves to C Lydian.

I took advantage of having a lot of tracks and automated mixing available (there are moments in the 4th cut where there are 50 stereo pairs happening). All of the pieces are loosely based on the canonic form, (Row Row Row Your Boat), which means that the phrase and it's harmonies are transposed and displaced, and sometimes it's folded back on itself. Nothing they weren't doing back in the 14th century.

If you're still reading this, you're probably anxious to hear what it all sounds like. One thing is certain - Chas Smith is taking the steel guitar into an entirely different realm. You really have to hear it to believe it.
-b0b-
  1. An Hour Out of Desert Center (8:41)
  2. Absence of Redemption (13:29)
  3. Albuquerque 5402 - A Curse of Beauty (8:00)
  4. Albuquerque 5402 - A '75 Scircura (24:15) 
back

Copyright ©2003-2012 by The Steel Guitar Forum