Single Sessions
Before I came up with the idea of inviting friends to join me on my new (video) album which became: Will Sophie & Friends – ‘Partners in Passion’, I did a couple of improvisation sessions on my own. Just capturing the sound I heard in my head, inspired by the surroundings during this last summer. I prefer working in silence because it’s then when I hear the most and that’s where most idea’s begin.
The old school way
Although I play multiple musical instruments, the guitar became my main ‘tool’ as I can express myself best on this instrument. Guitar players from my generation where used to just plug their guitar straight into some amp available. Effect pedals like today were not that much around, unless you must have had a fetish for fuzzy sounds, Jimi’s wahwah or some of the early phaser or flanger pedals.
The idea back then was to create a tone from the fingers and just practice until you got it right. For instance, natural sustain when needed, just came from turning up the amp until it started to distort. It helped you to get a better tone and made playing solo’s a lot easier. So there it is again, a thing we use to call ‘old school’ today. The today’s ‘front of house headache’.. 🙂
Soundscapes
As I wrote in my previous blogs, a lot of music just comes to me on the spot. In this case I’d plugged my DeArmond T400 into my converted Fender Vibrolux Reverb amp. This kind of ‘pure sound’ inspires me to play more or less Rootsy stuff like in the roadmovies ‘Crossroads’, ‘Southern Comfort’ and ‘Dead man’. That last one has original music by Neil Young. If you ask me, that soundtrack was totally spot on! I just love that kind of half improvised playing, totally capturing the atmosphere of the movie scenes.
Musical freedom
I like both listening and creating music without being trapped into some song structure way of writing with the typical verse, chorus and bridge kind of thing. To me the imagination factor is the true key in music. I guess that’s why I like instrumental music a lot. You can always make up your own story, depending of the mood you’re in at that very moment.
In this short video below, just another short Rootsy impro.