Continuing my solo-guitar thing, this week has a fretted instrument (Univox Effie Hollowbody in Fahey C tuning) going through the Afghan Rubab resonator network I put together last week. There's also a send to a convolution reverb with a large space impulse, and Ableton's Wide & Warm audio effect rack on the output.

Recorded live with no edits--you can hear some notes against the side of the frets...but it seemed honest to leave it.

The title comes from M101, the pinwheel galaxy, and the dedication is to a friend who would have been celebrating a birthday today, had he not left us earlier this year. (I raised both a glass and a guitar to Russ today.)

This one's solo guitar--specifically, a fretless and headless guitar put together roughly from remnants of a smashed acoustic, built by Phosphene Audio. I've had it for a few years, having traded a pedal for it. I knew there were songs in there.

A couple days ago I retuned it from concert tuning to something approaching the three drone and three melody strings of an Afghan rubab, and did some quick improvisations, one of which is the playing you hear in this piece. Cool...but it didn't sound enough like a rubab. I sent it to some convolution reverb, which was good, but I could do more.

First I added Ableton's Corpus plugin inline, and added a membrane resonator. That helped get a bit of a banjo quality, but didn't address the rubab's 13 sympathetic strings. There was, however, nothing stopping me from adding 13 more instances of Corpus using the string resonator, and setting them up in parallel chains using an audio effects rack. I brought the membrane Corpus instance in, and another chain with no effects. That's what you're hearing here.

The title comes from the galaxy NGC 100 being a deep-sky spiral.