Contact Mic

I picked up a contact microphone today for my guitar. It sticks to any flat surface with this earthquake-glue type stuff and picks up the vibrations of that surface. The immediate reason for having it is that I've started playing with bitones on guitar, or the notes that are produced by plucking the string on the "backside" of your finger, in between your left hand and the headstock. By sliding in any direction, as the regular note gets lower the bitone gets higher, and vice versa. Also, because the higher frets are closer together, this means that the lower bitones have microtones in them, outside of the normally used twelve pitches. Beyond that, a hammer on when you can hear the bitone usually produces crazy sounds with the frequency interference between the two sides of the string. 

So here's the idea. No one has written a serious piece for solo electric guitar (that doesn't sound cheesy as hell) besides Steve Mackey. This could be a good project for this year. Get two of the same amp (relatively small, due to being broke), plug the regular guitar output into one amp and the contact mic (bitone) output into the other. I tried this at the store and the outcome was pretty sweet, but writing a piece for that setup will take some serious time. As will mapping out some system of tonal functions for the bitones. I think I need to pay Mark Dresser a visit when I get back to San Diego, because he's done some similar stuff for contrabass.

I'll post anything I find out, and if I get some kind of cool setup together I'll put up a picture.

Framed Silence

A couple of days ago my good friend Candice asked to see a piece I had written, so I showed her my piano piece, called 88 (above, in case you want to play it). She asked me to explain what was going on in it (theoretically) and I did, and then she asked why there was so much silence in the middle section. I answered that it felt right, given the rest of the piece, and caught the listener's attention.

I've been thinking about that answer for a couple of days, and now have a far better understanding of why the silence seems "right" there. The piece is written to a set of serial parameters, as far as pitch is concerned. This is nothing new; composers have been trying out different ways of writing music mathematically for about a hundred years now. Something that has always fascinated me is how these composers have managed to put their own voices into predetermined, mathematical structures. The silence in my piece, I realized, is my way of inserting myself into something that is predetermined and cannot be changed. The pitches are going to continue in the method that the formula prescribes, but by pausing that formula, I find a way to break the system while operating within its limits. I could have held the rest indefinitely without breaking any of the rules I had set up, but I think if I had done that the audience probably would have walked out at some point. In the most melodramatic of phrases, the silence is me screaming that I exist.