new song, "passion fruit nightmare"

got a new song done. the song itself isn't anything really special or different than what i've been doing the last several months, but i like my playing on it. i also wanted something to put behind some ambient sounds i recorded at horyu temple, so i came up with this. i used dubstation as i do a lot these days to get some glitchy sounds from a simple acoustic guitar sample, and i used the delay in reaper to increase the rhythmic complexity of the sound over time of the cowbell from the main loop. that delay, called "readelay," is an as-many-taps-as-you-want delay, so i just made several and slowly faded them in one by one. multi-tap delays like that are really great for making complex rhythms out of otherwise simple rhythmic figures. now that i think about it, maybe i'll work more with that in my next song. from just playing some simple, stocatto phrases on trombone, i should be able to get some steve reich-like stuff going on in an improvisational way.

i again used the scale i came up with for the improvisation i did with the temple bell at horyu, the lydian dominant with a flat 2nd. i really like this scale. it has the first three notes of the spanish phrygian but the rest is lydian dominant, which is nice, because although i like the spanish phrygian, it's too easy to sound like you're playing klezmer or wanna-be "arabic" music with it. as much as i love john zorn's masada stuff, that's not what i'm going for. plus, the spanish phrygian seems more suited to fast, intense blowing whereas whatever scale i stumbled on these days, with its sharp 4 and major 6, seems better suited to the kind of slow playing i'm into.