I wanted to go in a different direction this week, and picked up the bağlama-tuned Heit Deluxe (like this one, but not as clean and in a red-burst), and came up with the main riff. I recorded that to the shaker, and ended up with about three minutes. During the week, I added percussion (tambourines, hand drums), hand-claps (MIDI), and a trap-set kick drum in an effects rack with two parallel high-pass filters--one to accentuate the beater, and one to accentuate the resonance of the shell. I also recorded a number of other guitar lines to respond to the initial one, and to extend its length a bit, editing them into a structure.

Tuning: GgDDAa, played with fingers. Each guitar channel got different degrees of Auto-Filter, one of them bandpass, two high-pass, with different degrees of drive. I also used a bit of filtering/drive on the hand claps and hand drums. Rather than auto-panning most things, I left most things statically panned, and just auto-panned hand claps and some percussion in time with the track, to set up a call-and-response effect. I did add a bit of delay on the claps, but most atmosphere is from two convolution reverbs (one small space, one larger)--my idea was to keep it as much like a field recording as I could.

The master channel got Full-Chain Master for compression/limiting.

Title comes from the history of the bağlama--since it comes from the saz used by the Azerbaijani Ashiqs, whose name is related to the Avestan root iš-, which means "to seek" or "to search."