I’ll post some of my recordings here from time to time. Hopefully the IT people won’t mind.

My equipment: mostly a 2003 Taylor 614 Limited, more recently a 2010 Taylor 64ce (nylon string). Taylor makes fabulous guitars. I also have a Gold Tone Weissenborn, a 68 Gibson LP, an old Guild, a Godin solid body nylon electric, a solid body ESP electric, and a few others. Recordings are typically made using the instrument’s pickup directly into a Zoom 96 kHz/24 bit recorder, and I will then use Audacity or Cubase to edit and clean it up. I’m not much of a recording engineer, so be prepared to adjust the volume and equalization to your preferences.

Unless specified otherwise, the tuning is drop D.

January 2011: A recent version of Take the A Train by Billy Strayhorn. The FexEx guy showed up during the last few bars, hence the abrupt ending.

I recently bought a Boomerang III phrase sampler. It’s a multiple track looper, in which tracks can run either synchronously or independently of each other. An on-the-fly improv, using the device, is here. All sounds were made on the Taylor 614: I first made a 2-bar percussion track by tapping, and then synched to it a 4 bar fill; these run throughout. The first part of the “tune” uses a stacking feature, in which a loop continuously records on top of itself: this can create a house-of-mirrors effect. In the second part I record a simple phrase and then try to improvise off of it.

February 2011: on the occasion of valentine’s day, a version (from last year) of My Funny Valentine, by Rodgers and Hart, and made popular by Chet Baker, then Miles Davis, and then practically everyone else.

March 2011: More improv using the looper is here. The b string went flat, and somewhere something got clipped, resulting in a fuzzy sound. I could say that I did this intentionally, to recreate the warm tube sound of old amplifiers, but I don’t think I would be fooling anyone. Anyway, a homage to spring.

Spring Break 2011: The jazz standard Like Someone in Love, music by Jimmy Van Heusen, with lyrics by Johnny Burke, although lyrics don’t matter here since you won’t hear any. If you think there are too many chords in this tune, then jam band in a box might be more appropriate.

I removed the previous two links: I don’t want to put too much up at any one time.

April 2011: More looper jams. This one is titled Gotta Dance; the theatre department put on an excellent production over the weekend by this name, and the ticket stub happened to be next to my computer when I was saving the wave file. Seemed like as good a name as any. This is about as far as I get when it comes to lyrics. The recording was a straight shot, i.e., no editing except for the fade in at the beginning.

A somewhat too—fast version of A. C. Jobim’s Desafinado, and a somewhat too—slow version of Like Someone in Love .

September 2011: Bob Richardson (who was a wonderful teacher, pianist, and human being) believed that proper jazz health required the playing of all the things you are at least twice a day. Purists will notice that my version is a half step lower than the traditional A flat. The nice thing about solo guitar is that it frees you to transpose the tune to a key that better lies on the guitar, so in this case I play it in G. Most of the tune can be played using first position, open grips (E-, A-, D, G, C, etc.). And drop D greatly expands the potential for a bass line. Warning: some of the measures may not add up (this is another benefit of playing solo: you don’t have to worry about irritating your fellow musicians by screwing up the count).

On the trail is a looper improv composition(?), involving a one measure sync loop (which starts at the beginning) coupled with a much longer (32 or more; I lost count) outer loop. The outer loop starts with random, mostly unassociated phrases, and as they cycle I try to merge them in to something more coherent, and finally I give up. It reminds me of a work song, i.e., something that would be sung to get your mind off of something else.

October 2011: Somewhat older material: Ave Maria (F. Schubert), and Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring (J. S. Bach). Both are based on classical guitar arrangements by Alexander Gluklikh. JJOMD is in the original key, and AM has been dropped down a m3 (to G). This is the extent of my classical repertoire.

I have an old LP (old and LP is, I guess, an oxymoron) of Bill Evans playing Polka dots and moonbeams. Evans had this wonderful, halting swing; so much of his music was in his pauses. As usual, I screwed up the ending. The phone was ringing.

A newer version of Desafinado: straight through, one time.

My Weissenborn sounds like this. The strings are very old, and I cranked up the compression to try to get rid of the bar noise.

And a simple composition: As the sun sets.