They Call Me The Backwoods Debussy (disquiet0316) by Nate Trier

This track is an "asynchronous collaboration" with encym III https://soundcloud.com/encymlll

His was literally the last Disquiet0315 track I listened to, but it was also the one that really grabbed me, so I decided to trust my gut and choose this one for collaboration.

I wanted to treat this like a classical piece, analyze the notes and intervals, etc., and build on it, but time was tight this weekend. I made an attempt to convert the audio to MIDI and dump it into a notation program, but that didn't work...finally I ended up resolving to do three takes of improv over the track. I did two takes, and then for the third take I decided I pretty much knew what I wanted to happen, so I played just those phrases on the piano. This felt much more deliberate and constructed. I moved them around a little bit on the timeline so that sometimes they answered the guitar, sometimes the guitar answered them.

The germ of my original idea survived, in that I transposed all of the phrases up a fifth, just at the end of the track. This gives an A dorian in the piano over D dorian in the guitar, which is a nice effect and makes us feel like we have gone somewhere new.

In terms of sound design, I used Ableton's "Grand Piano" plug-in (no time to get to a real piano), lengthened the attack time, and then tried to add some grit so it would match the guitar, using AudioDamage's Fuzz plugin and iZotope's Vinyl.

Towards the end, the piano delves into the world of delay and echo, to mimic the guitar.

The name is a winky reference to the instrumentation (twangy guitar and piano) and the harmony that emerged (parallel modes on different starting pitches).

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More on this 316th weekly Disquiet Junto project (El Segundo: Record the second third of a trio, adding to a pre-existing track.) at:

https://disquiet.com/0316/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0316-el-segundo/

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Image associated with this project is adapted from a photo by Martin Kenny and is used via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/neoFUH

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/