In honour of this momentous, protracted and horrendous week, I decided to take up my electric guitar, channeling days of anxiety into a short improvisation where I force myself to slow down.
There are key two aspects to the improvisation: the rolling action of my right hand and fingers, and moving my left hand from the top of the guitar neck to the headstock.
When the piece begins, I’m at the top of the neck rolling my fingers over the strings as fast as I can, then as I descend the neck, this action slows. In addition to this, at the top of the neck I wanted the notes to be less distinct, but rather than using dissonance or block of sounds, to purposefully mute the strings with my left hand.
The guitar is tuned to modal G (CGDGBE) and I used G as the point of reference for my left hand as it descends, making notes corresponding to the root and constituent notes of a G major scale more apparent.
I’m running the electric guitar through a short delay with a bit of reverse repeat on it to leave vanishing traces of the previous notes/actions.
The improvisation was trickier than I thought and took several takes to get a version to my satisfaction.