This one's something of a salvage job. I'd had multiple notions this week, each of which increased this track's level of difficulty, and ultimately threw out both the strongest motif, and the initial thought behind the track. Does it work anyway? As a mood piece, it works better than the original idea.

I'd read a piece this week arguing that tempo consistency is a problem in contemporary music; while that may or may not be true, it's interesting that hits of the classic analog recording era had notable variations in tempo--not accidentally, but in response to the feel of the music. (A drummer might slow down slightly before accelerating into a dramatic chorus, for example.) So my thought had been to allow tempo variations, which led to variations in time signature, and which led to pieces that...sounded like they all belonged to different songs.

Adding to the complexity, I decided to use the microtonal guitar, so the idea of "key" became more complicated. Not only is this instrument microtonal, but it's also fretted in just intonation intervals, 24 to the 2/1. So the notes are a lot closer together, and chords are much more difficult than on a 12TET guitar.

Collaging the sections together with the different tempi just ended up sounding wrong, so I normalized to a reasonable sounding 90 bpm (though this is kind of a half-time piece, so it's more like 45 bpm). Then I added a fourth track to fill in gaps. Finally, I had to punt on the strongest theme, a 76 bpm fingerpicking exercise in 9/8. That'll have to go somewhere else, eventually, as it didn't fit at all with the rest of this piece.

Signal chain: microtonal Tele Deluxe into UA Volt (with a little clipping here and there), Ableton Live's Roar plugin on the neck-pickup-only track, some convolution reverb, and multiband compression/eq on the mix.

The title comes from the elevation of the summit of Scotland's Mount Scaraben, 626 meters.

Each week I think I'm going to do something very minimal and spacious, and each week I end up filling the rests with notes. This one's no exception, but given the busy tax-preparation weekend, I'll take what music shows up in the ether.

For this one, I impulsively did something I haven't done in five years: changed strings on the PureSalem Mendiola. Admittedly, I like the sound and feel of old strings, though this old set had a layer of oxidation and a ding in one of the plain steel strings, so it was time. While I did that, the neck wasn't under tension for a while, and it bowed back just a little...so there's some additional fret buzz in there. (I've loosened the truss rod a little; getting closer to ideal.)

The vibe here is contemplative, with some resolve. I'll take it.

The usual no-effects inline, though there's convolution reverb send from each track, and compression/eq on the stereo out.

The title comes from the Irish town of Clonakitty, which is at the end of R588.

A little later than usual with this one, but...the timing of the challenge works in my favor here.

This week I (mostly) finished restoring a 70s (maybe earlier? but the pickups seem to be 70s) pedal steel, built from a kit, and out of commission for quite a long time before it came to me. I've put on new tuners, cleaned things up, made adjustments, and...it's a playable instrument! I've wanted to play a pedal steel for years, so it's nice to bring that to life. So this week's track had to feature it. (Inline effects: a bit of Auto-Filter for high-pass, and Auto-Pan for faint tremolo.

I did start with a couple syncopated patterns I came up with using Ableton's 64 Pad Kit Jazz, with some Max Humanizer. After tracking pedal steel and Epiphone bass (usual EQ-8 rolloff), added two tracks of home-built Res-O-Glas guitar (through the Balls Effects KWB and Vox Wah, then inline high-pass Auto-Filter and Cabinet for some air).

Sends: two Echo channels (Tape Reverb and Dark Fade presets), and two convolution reverbs with high-pass Auto-Filter.

There's Master Full-Chain (flat) on the stereo out.

The title comes from there being 59 stellations on a regular icosohedron.

This one was difficult to finish--I didn't want to fall into a retread, and some aspects are similar to a lot of other this-tempo guitar/bass/keys/drums things I've done. So...what to do? I started editing stuff out, and this start/stop approach seemed to pull it into having an identity.

64-pad jazz drum rack, 64-pad special kit (both with M4L Humanizer and Drum Buss, two Puremagnetik Rhodes instruments, Epi P-J bass through the Balls KWB (still pulled down bass with EQ-8), two tracks of Res-O-Glas (KWB and not, one with Auto-Filter drive and not), Sends: two Echo and one convolution reverb. Full-chain master on the master.

Title from the difficulty of extracting this week's element lutetium, but also kind of a difficult track to extract, so it fit.

Back to the funk. This week brought a new pedal (the Balls Effects KWB pedal, a variant of the MXR Distortion +/Ross pedal with switchable diodes and sweepable clipping), so I used that on guitars and bass. This one started as drum tracks (Drum Rack 64-pad Jazz kit), to which I added a bit of a low end with additional Typhoon kick and some percussion). Then I added two Puremagnetik Rhodes pianos, and laid down guitar (modulated wah and stationary wah) and bass (EQ-8 for bass rolloff). Sends: room-sized convolution reverb and an Echo channel.

Title from...a dad joke about the use of gadolinium (element 64) as part of the emergency shut-down procedure of some reactors, including the CANDU. (Sorry.)

Since I'm still listening a lot to later Talk Talk, this week's piece bears some influence--I wanted something that resisted settling down, collaged together from a lot of loose improvisation. I used a drum rack of Ableton's 64-pad jazz drums, some handclaps, and improvised with some Fahey-tuned Univox hollow body. Keys and bass came later, and for extra texture stretched some of the guitar lines and put them through reverb only.

Sends: two convolution reverbs and one channel of echo. Little touches of auto-pan and auto-pan tremolo throughout. And some M4L Humanizer on the drums. Full-chain master on the 2.

Title from two applications of europium: in the bright reds of CRTs and in memory chips.

Mostly in-the-box, plus bass. Drum rack of 909, hand clap samples, Tension/Clav and Electric/Rhodes, Epiphone bass. Lots of roll-off on bass below 87Hz to get out of the way of the kick. Three sends--two convolution reverbs and one filter delay.

Title comes from the 50 Gates of Wisdom/Impurity of the Kabbalah.

8 tracks (drum rack of single-hit trap kit, handclaps, percussion, three electric pianos, guitar, bass). Funk. Half-way through the year!

Nothing special in production notes, other than my using the Glue compressor to side-chain the bass to the biamped/dual-filtered kick drum. (One resonant peak on the shell, one on the beater). The glue compressor gets a bit dirty on the peaks in a pleasing way. Also there are two different convolution reverbs with different small rooms for air on them.

Otherwise, lots of editing on the guitar to remove notes--not to hide mistakes so much as to make space.

A funk track emerged this week. I started playing with beats (single-hits from a dry funk kit), added percussion (tabla, claps, conga/bongo), Wurlitzer and Rhodes...some piano and organ that I removed, put on bass, and two tracks (distorted and not distorted) of Epiphone Moderne through the Vox Wah. Notable production items...included M4L humanizer, subtle use of a couple different convolution reverbs (room and plate), simple delay cascading into filter delay, and not any automation--it just seemed to work better as a static thing.

Title comes from association from the Pythagorean distaste for the number 17, coming as it does as the interval between the numbers 16 and 18. Also, I've used a lot of major seconds in this. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17_(number)#cite_note-14, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_second#Epogdoon)

Also, mad respect to anyone hanging in there!

I had a show this weekend, and spent much of the week preparing for it (new Max/MSP patch, testing with instruments), but late in the week, I wanted to hear something like this drum beat, and whipped that up with some keyboards. I tracked bass and guitar on Saturday, and spent a few hours on Sunday to arrange and mix. There's a drum rack of dry trap kit (high-pass Auto-Filter on the kick; low-pass Auto-filter with drive on the whole kit), one of a hand drum I have, and hand claps (with low-pass Auto-Filter with drive to make it a little less clean). There's Ableton's Electric instrument (MkI2 Crunchy) through band-pass Auto-Filter with modulation, Simpler (Grand Piano preset) with the same Auto-Filter treatment, and Collision (Street Bells) for some variety. (I almost put vibes there, but low street bells sounded better.)

Bass is the Epiphone P-J (on P), with a little convolution reverb. Guitar: '67 Kalamazoo into Vox Wah, and the same guitar through the Reuss RF-01 Repeater Fuzz into the Vox Wah. I tracked more parts than I used.

The tricky thing with this one was getting the parts not to conflict; everything worked better the sparser it was. There's some simple delay in addition to the convolution reverb, and Full-Chain Master on the master channel.

The title comes from it being week 4, and is a bit of a reference to the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.