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| Toggle Switch Technique The following stuff chronicles my (Keith's) experiments with the guitar, particularly trying to perfect a technique using delay and the toggle switch to make the guitar sound more like a sequenced keyboard. If you're not a guitarist, you'll probably think the descriptions are really boring. Hopefully you'll like the music, though. I'm putting it here mostly so people will believe me when I say that this is really just a guitar and a simple delay, and also to explain to others how to recreate it (I'm trying not to be like Alex Lifeson from Rush, who shrouds his amps with big pieces of fabric, and tapes over his effects pedals so people can't recreate his sound.) Here is a run-down of the sound files, in order of possible enjoyability: Guitar Techno IV The Perfect Fit (demo with bad drum loop) Sweep Echo Solo guitar, with a baroque sort of climax Same as the previous one, just a lot faster Very rough early attempt Another rough early one Here is my first attempt, using the toggle switch and a sweep echo effect. I had just gotten one of these guitars, which had a pickup toggle switch and volume knobs for each of the pickups. I tapped the note I wanted with my left hand while the selected pickup was turned all the way down, then switched to the pickup that had the volume turned up. The effect is that the note has a much more sudden beginning, like a keyboard, and you don't hear the left hand "tap" sound like you normally would. This is something I've heard guitarists do in various ways over the past few decades, the only thing I'm doing differently is playing with the delay. Here's the second attempt (which is pretty rough . . . actually, the rest are pretty rough), where I changed the delay so that it only repeated once and at the same volume as the original note, and set the tempo so that if I played constant eighth notes in the left hand, the repeated note would play exactly 3/4ths of a beat after the original note. If I use upper case letters for the original notes, and lower for the same notes repeated, it looks like this: A BaCbDcEdFeGfHgIh i (If that doesn't make sense, it's not because it's mind-bogglingly complicated, it's because I'm not doing a good job of explaining it.) The thing I like about this technique is that it actually allows for a good amount of musical variety. You can do arpeggios or melody lines to a limited extent. The major limiting factor is rhythm, in that you can only really do eighth notes and rests, and I try to mix the arpeggios and the melodic elements together, and by accenting certain notes it's easy to get some interesting rhythms going. Bach often did a similar thing, doing entire pieces using mostly flowing eighth notes. Here is a softer more atmospheric take and here is more techno-ish sort of sound. And, though it takes some practice, you can work it up to something pretty quick: Really Fast Toggle Switch Techno Lastly, check out this to see what the whole thing sounds like with an actual drumbeat. |