Last weekend I went up to Burbage which is in the Peak District National Park just a few miles beyond the city boundary from where I live in Sheffield. On a warm sunny afternoon it’s a beautiful place to be with stunning vistas and some of the best rock climbing in Europe.
You can easily commune with nature and your own inner creative consciousness in an environment like this I find.
There are some photographs further down the page.
Partly inspired by this I had a hankering to make some music again for the first time in several months.
I wondered how I might be able to electronically process a three chord blues structure in a minor key.
The result is very floaty and ethereal. It sounds nothing like blues at all!
This is three chords from a blues progression separated and looped individually with various filters and delays. Each loop has a different length and period of silence to ensure variety in the way they collide and overlap each other.
The guitar was a Fender Stratocaster recorded with no effects.
The bass parts were added in MIDI afterwards.
This is the second of four attempts to finalize the track.
Although attempts #3 and #4 are cleaner and more mathematically perfect and this one has a few glitches and imperfections this version has a certain rambling, “rightness”, that I like.
It’s Creative Commons licensed and free to download so help yourself if you like it.
If you would like a lossless version a Name Your Price download is available here
mark-ward.bandcamp.com/track/e-minor-blues
And here are a few photos…
