Album Notes

This CD is the intersection of a number of unusual musical paths that I've been pursuing for years, paths that I embarked on in the late 1980s when writing the "Electronic Guitarist" column for Guitar Player magazine and studying Electronic Composition at Oakland's famed Mills College Center for Contemporary Music. But it has been until recent years, with the unbelievable increases in the processing power of personal computers and proliferation of inventive music software and the standards that let programs talk to each other, that it has been possible to pull it all together on a laptop. Plus, I obtained a guitar with a built-in hexaphonic pickup that is the best MIDI controller I've ever had - so I can play bass parts, drum parts, etc. with some ease.

This is a CD that was made essentially without limits, other than the all-too-obvious ones of my own imagination and time. It often uses the techniques of Live Looping as a starting point and a discipline, and usually tries to showcase the more idiosyncratic aspects of my own guitar phrasing, in ways that conventional song structures won't do.

Live Looping means that I decide while I'm playing to record a snippet, start recording with a touch of my toe, end recording with another touch, and then hear that recording played back over and over again, with layers that I can add to it while it's playing. There are a lot of other tricks, but the gist is essentially that we are in Instant Composition territory with live looping. For these recordings, I have thrown out all the boring groping and waiting for something to happen that can characterize a live improvisation, and distilled out only the scintillating, wonderful parts, which I have then sometimes seasoned with a little bit of edit suite magic, juggling around parts, adding a little bit here and there, sometimes even swapping in a different drum part. The result is a recording that bears up well to repeated listenings, I feel. I hope you enjoy it.