Thoughts
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What Dweezil Zappa is doing with guitar signal processing & sound design is astonishing. He’s using guitar technology to replicate FZ’s in-studio orchestration/overdub strategies live on stage. He splits the guitar signal to multiple paths, each with their own location in the stereo field then applies effects to each signal to create layers of guitars…
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Who knows if this is a theory, but I’ll give it a shot. Whenever I’m feeling that my creativity isn’t flowing properly, I rearrange stuff. Having issues playing your guitar? Change something. Play standing up. Swap out a pedal. Change picks. Change gauge of guitar strings. Play with a slide. Play with your eyes closed.…
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I spent a few days up in the mountains of northern Arizona with my dog Marty recently. Sitting there at camp, staring out into the forest got me thinking about the album cover for Styx’ “The Grand Illusion.” This led me down the rabbit hole of re-listening to the four pack of middle era Styx…
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Two months. That’s how long it took to get through Ben Ratliff‘s Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, and not because of length or density. It’s a read-two-pages, think-two-hours kind of book. The subject is the post-A Love Supreme Coltrane, the years most biographies rush past on their way to the mythology. Ratliff doesn’t rush.…