It is still looking like summer festival season will be cancelled. But fear not; you can count on Guitar Moderne to continue to supply virtual, germ-free festivals like this. Pandemic is creating new paradigms for performance. Solo looping, already popular, ensures social distancing from band members. Those musicians brave (or foolhardy—you be the judge) enough to play together in an enclosed space are often doing so without an audience save for a skeleton camera crew.
The rollout of the Poly Effects pedals has been one of the slowest in memory. It was at least three years ago that Loki Davison unveiled his concept for a modular, programable, touchscreen, pedal. Now that his concept seems to be finally hitting the street, we see that like some Source Audio pedals, the basic housing allows either pedal to perform the functions of the other. Here are a couple of demos outside the noisy NAMM environment that show some of the fascinating possibilities.
Henry Kaiser has been offering a series of weekly, solo, “live” performances” through Cuneiform Records. Mike Baggetta has posted a video of his band MSSV also performing “live.” Here, Henry talks about his duo video with Baggetta, why these performances are not streamed, and both reveal how they record them.
The new releases are piling up. Though live music shows are starting again, it is with limited audiences—hence limited money, so it would help these artists if you were to buy their recordings. Also, it will give you something to do all while we all wait this out.
One upside of sheltering in place is that it has given me time to get back to playing guitar through my Laptop/iPad rig. I posted some video snippets on Facebook, which prompted some questions about my setup. You can read about some of my earlier experiences here. But the time seems ripe to reveal the results of some improvements in both my technique and the technology.