An improvisation over drones using e-bow guitar and glass slide. 

The reverb and stereo width of the lead guitar are controlled by an envelope follower I built in Max fo Live.

Steel and Glass (2012)

A few years ago now, summers in England, and particularly in Wales, were littered with events known as free festivals. At such an event, a few hundred people would gather together in a field for a weekend and have experiences. To accompany these, there was always music and no festival was complete without the looping guitarist. 

The looping guitarist was a guy who, inspired by Robert Fripp and John Martyn and unconsciously channelling Terry Riley, would set up on a small sound stage at about 2 a.m. with an acoustic guitar and a Roland Space Echo and noodle into the night until the last of his audience slumped into unconsciousness.  The technique employed was simply to improvise some phrases into a long, slowly decaying echo, soaked in reverb, and then play along to whatever came back out of the speakers.

Lying in my tent, listening to these pleasant modal wanderings bouncing about a chilly field, it occurred to me that it might be more interesting if the accompaniment could vary – still using events that the guitarist had already played but not necessarily repeating them in the order in which they had occurred, or one that he or she could predict. 

These thoughts came back to me when I started to experiment with hexaphonic guitar and inspired the design of my first piece for this instrument, called Out of the Loop.
 
Sound is recorded simultaneously from the conventional pickup  on an electric guitar and from a hexaphonic pickup via a breakout box. The conventional sound is heard in real time but the six channels from the hex pickup are stored in a buffer on computer. The computer then chooses events from the different strings and plays them back at varying times to form an accompaniment. The accompanying sounds are pitched shifted away from the original as the piece develops.

Stereo reduction of eight-channel original.

Software uses MAX 6 and IRCAM Mubu.
Breakout Box by Bill Baxendale  (http://billbax.110mb.com/) 

Out Of The Loop

Stereo sound example to accompany my PhD "Generative Music from Fuzzy Logic and Probability" 2017

01 November Extract

Stereo sound examples to accompany my PhD "Generative Music from Fuzzy Logic and Probability" 2017

11 OBAT ASGScan Output

10 OBAT Convolved

09 OBAT Ee Grain

08 OBAT Green And Golden

07 Inside Track Noisy Swirls

06 Inside Track Long Swirls

05 In Flight Whip Crack

04 In Flight Sparse To Thick

03 In Flight Birds

02 In Flight Spectrogram Detail

As climate change takes greater effect there will be more and more extreme rainfall events like those occurring recently in India, China and even the UK. With these events may come flooding, significant crop damage and loss of life.

One drop becomes two, becomes many.

A Miniature for the art!-climate competition held by CEIArtE in Buenos Aires.

One Drop (2013)

Richard Garrett is an english composer living in Wales. He started out playing noisy rock music, then jazz. Now, he makes the computers do all the hard work. 

He is currently studying for an PhD  at Bangor University.

Projects to date include:

Lightening Rock Technology Collective (album 'This is no Game' 1984)
Gilles Petit (singing)
Welsh Jazz Summer School
Generative Music:
       Robot Sculpture (CD 2001)
       Dark Symphony (Installation with Brian Eno et al. Linz 2003)
Workshop in Algorithmic Computer Music (Dave Cope, Peter Elsea 2004)
Weathersongs:
      Album (CD 2006)
      Installation (Wales, Italy 2007)
nwdlbots (pronounced "noodlebots) - generative software for Ableton Live (2010)
AudioSprayGun - generative sound creation/ spatialisation device (2013 - )



Richard Garrett (Wales)

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