This song began, at least for me, very late one night in my apartment in Kuala Lumpur around 2006, after a trip to  the jazz club No Black Tie with Eka (then Oetoyo, now Mason). Eka sang and we tried to make something work on an old nylon string guitar. I wasn't playing much, just trying to let it sing. The words are Eka's and a lot of the music is too. We captured that jam on my little mp3 player. Michelle added a second verse. We recently dusted an old laptop recording off and added some sax. Maybe it will shape up in the end! Michelle is singing & Don Cosgrove plays sax - the only decent quality recording here. All the rest uses my laptop's built in mic. 


What (Michelle sings, Don plays Sax)

Pedal: Collage for Line 6 DL4 delay pedal (2016) (2:28)

    0:00 pedal chorus
    0:45 filigree
    1:12 calm
    1:44 three voices

This piece extends exploration with electric guitar and effects pedals by dispensing entirely with an electronic input. The Line 6 DL4 delay pedal is a quirky and fascinating processing and 'echo' environment. Its digital circuitry sets out to emulate classic guitar effects that, in turn, use magnetic tape loops to imitate natural echo. Along the way, these pedals developed so that extremely resonant environments could be set up, environments with the potential to resonate on their own, with their own distinct resonant frequencie

Pedal: collage for Line 6 DL4 delay pedal (2016)

Harmonic Study For Electric Guitar (2016)

Song 3 (live) Alan McLean & Goh Lee Kwang at Findars SpAce, Central Market Annexe, KL, 2009

Seasong

Most people who play guitar learn to tune the strings using 'beats', the loud /soft pattern that's created when two strings are almost exactly at the same pitch. As the tuning becomes more exact, the beats slow and eventually (almost) stop. Its possible to miss their extrordiary beauty. Although two strings are plucked at vert similar frequencies, a single tone is heard. The changing volume does not always follow a simple, steady rhythm. It often forms more complex patters, for example groups of three beats separated by a short pause. In addition, subtle phase shifts within each beat creates a sound that we do not really have vocabulary to describe (guitarists call it the wa-wa-wa sound)  but which can be heard as movement,  the rotation of the note in a stereo soundstage.

The musical potential of notes of very similar frequencies has been explored by only a few artists, notably Phil Niblock and Giacinto Scelsi. (Conventional music theory, on the other hand, is explicitly based on tones that are not close enough to create beats.) This piece explores the sound potential of a guitar capable of producing notes that are very close together - so that an octave is made up of 60 of notes.
 
My microtone guitar is a conventional classical guitar fitted with six identical low 'E' strings, tuned using one of the guitar's frets so that the highest string is a semitone above the lowest. the intermediate strings are tuned evenly by ensuring that the rate of the beats heard between any two consecutive strings is the same. In this piece, the guitar is played only using each string's first two harmonics which are, respectively, one octave and an octave and a fifth above the string's fundamental note. Played in this way, the guitar has very limited melodic capabilities, being able to produce of only four conventional notes, E, B, F and C flat. This use of natural harmonics produces purer notes with a more stable pitch, something that is often used by guitarists for tuning. You can hear hear the guitar's raw sound in another recording 'Strum'.

This is a study, an exploration of the instrument's capabilities, but it is unadventurous in terms of its composition. Another piece 'From 'Metamorphose', with Goh Lee Kwang, uses electric guitar and electronics to generate phase-shifting notes and blocks of sound with some similar qualities, and its composition is more coherent.

In a slightly different form, this recording was included as part of a Classwar Karaok quarterly survey (classwarkaraoke.com/). Thanks to Joseph Granzow and the International School of Kuala Lumpur for making the recording possible.

Song 40 - study for microtone guitar

This microtone guitar is a conventional classical guitar fitted with six identical low 'E' strings, tuned using one of the guitar's frets so that the highest string is a semitone above the lowest. the intermediate strings are tuned evenly by ensuring that the rate of the beats heard between any two consecutive strings is the same.

Strum (for microtone guitar)

The Portion 2 (Alan McLean & Erich Fried) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Fried

The words are by Erich Fried and I just added some podcast material from the UN. The recording is coming along!

The Portion (feat Navi Pillay)

Dreaming of a white Christmas

A Scottish philosopher with an electric guitar who lives in Kuala Lumpur and spends time listening to Giacinto Scelsi's orchestral music.

Alan McLean

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