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"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-
- An Hour Out of Desert Center (8:41)
- Absence of Redemption (13:29)
- Albuquerque 5402 - A Curse of Beauty (8:00)
- Albuquerque 5402 - A '75 Scircura (24:15)
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