5 posts tagged “acoustic guitar”

The wheel spins, the blade sharpens and the suspense grows...

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Photo by danielycp
 

I found myself playing the guitar part of this piece a lot during a time of personal loss and grief. That may be enough to put you off right away - and if you're enjoying the brightness of spring then it's probably best to move on now - but if you're heavyhearted and want something to reflect on, then this is for you.

Sometimes you just need to languish in it a bit, going round and round, until gradually you find some sense of comfort.

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Photo by haikus59

Last summer I visited Benllech in Anglesey for the first time in many years. I used to go there as a kid to visit my grandparents, who retired there, and going down to the beach brought back lots of happy memories. We walked along Benllech beach to Red Wharf Bay, which as a child seemed an enormous distance away, but now is just a pleasant ten minute stroll to a wide inlet with sandbanks, beached fishing boats, and a decent pub overlooking the bay. I always liked the name, and associate it closely with my grandparents' Welsh collie Bryn, who when he wasn't trying to round up gulls used to slip off out of sight, and would invariably be tracked down hours later somewhere in the bay. It's a beautiful spot that inspired something uplifting and celebratory.

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Photo by icyblue

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The melody on this track is played on a bowed saw, or 'singing saw' as it's sometimes known. Bend a saw blade, find the sweet spot with a bow, and away you go. I love the sound you can make with it, almost like an acoustic version of another personal favourite, the theremin. Compared to the theremin, it's physically more demanding - and perhaps not as much fun as waving your arms about - as you have to maintain an 'S' shape to make a note, but the advantage is once you have a note it's a little easier to control the pitch. I also think the saw is harder to reproduce electronically than the theremin because of the fragility of the note's tone and sustain, and the sound made by the brushing of the bow hair on the metal.

Tú Dónde Estarás: Download the mp3

Late last year, I decided to indulge a whim, take a break from what I was doing, and spend some time recording some Spanish cover songs. The list was chiefly Latin American music that had influenced me one way or another, the common thread being that they had all played a part in sparking an interest in playing acoustic and "Spanish" guitar. After many interruptions, delays and other commitments I thought it was about time I finished them off, so here's the first.

I first heard this track on a tape that was a copy-of-a-copy, without track listings, which just had the name 'Congreso' on it. The previous copy had been given to my friend Omar by someone from Chile, and he duplicated it for me. That was about all I knew, but I was grabbed by this song that opened the album. I couldn't track down the album for years, though I did find a more recent album from what I presumed was the same group, which turned out to be a disappointment. As for more information on the band, I just knew they were from Chile, and were some loose collective with a vague connection to a music professor at some Chilean university; they took traditional Andean music and mixed it with rock, haunting harmonies and complex rhythms, without shying from a spot of dissonance here and there. I still haven't got the album this comes from, but did manage to track down an mp3 of it recently. My version here is pretty faithful in structure and melody, but with a few instrumentation changes including a spot of theremin and glass harmonica.