The Musings of a Guitarist

This composition is my end of 2nd year project at the University of Birmingham. It uses a variety of recorded harmonic sounds that are manipulated to create an atmospheric piece in the style of Monty Adkins.

Compositional Notes

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At the time of composing I was greatly inspired by the work of Monty Adkins in his first of five panels entitled To Luke. Determined to compose a piece in a similar style, I decided on guitar harmonics as a basis.

The Musings of a Guitarist opens with fairly unaltered natural harmonics, played on an acoustic guitar, which then transitions to an electric guitar, with increased alterations to the sound. I experimented a lot with bringing sound material in and out of focus by repeating melodic material with a narrower frequency spectrum. This allows the piece to progress from clean opening harmonics, to a hazy wash of conflicting harmonic sounds towards the end. As a contrast to this wash of sound, I used different timbral elements of the guitar, such as tapping the body, or playing above the nut to create a more percussive texture.

Technical Details

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I began this composition with a recording session. I enlisted the help of a friend who plays guitar, and we went into the studio and recorded a series of sounds from an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, and a violin. These consisting mostly of harmonics, but there were also some useful miscellaneous sounds extracted from the session, such as rubbing the wood of the instrument.

The session was then cut in REAPER to separate the elements out into individual bites and create a sound library. After the original sound bites, consisting mostly of one-shots were cut, I proceeded to generate more textural elements through post processing, using various GRM plugins, PaulxStretch, Cecilia 5 and TS2 to stretch and manipulate the sounds into something almost unrecognisable. Examples can be heard here.

All in all I ended up with 293 individual sound bites, only a small fraction of which were used in the final composition.

I then began to collage the sounds into chunks, which were then treated as melodic phrases when fitted into the structure of the whole piece. The entire piece is composed in REAPER

I used a lot of low frequency material to act as an underlying bass for these phrases, to give the piece more of a sense of cohesion.

There’s a significant amount of automated panning in the piece, with background material rotating around the listene creating a sense of 3D space (Listen to the violin pizzicato material at 1.35 with headphones and see how it rotates around the listener’s head). All mixing in the project was done via volume automation aswell, so that individual sound items could be mixed in the session instead of the entire track.

The structure starts fairly natural with sparse acoustic guitar harmonics over a low frequency bass. This gradually builds over in complexity over the runtime of the piece.

Some clicky material created from tapping the guitar is used as a stark contrast to the the flute-like harmonics. The middle of the piece features a lot of stretched harmonics, creating textures that last longer than the natural decay of the harmoncis. The electric guitar starting at 1.27 features a lot of reversed material and reverb, obscuring the initial attack of the notes, making it sound more like a synthesizer than a guitar. This only gets more prominant as you approach the midpoint, and the electric guitar features more heavily. The piece ends with a very stretched out, almost never-ending, singular harmonic, to create the idea that the guitarist keeps on musing into eternity.