Happy Halloween!

I recorded the underlying "spook alley" music onto my BOSS loop pedal a few years ago.  Don't ask me to explain what's going on with it.  Just a lot of dissonances stacked on top of each other.  I used my Eric Johnson Stratocaster and a Vox amp with vibrato and reverb set about half way.

The piece is hypnotic and repetitive, but I justify the length of the recording because various voices from the dead tell some tales along the way.  I played these over the top of the BOSS recording today:

1) A slide applied to the strings of my strat close to the bridge provides a spine-tingling chime.

2) A 1/4 size classical guitar with only two very detuned strings on it provides the woes of a damned soul.

3) Pick scrapes near the bridge of my strat provide a laughing ghost.

4) The whammy bar randomly attacked on open strings provides another tale from a miserable shade.

It's all kind of corny, but there are some really striking moments in it all, and it is pretty dreary music if you keep listening to it.  You get mesmerized by the plaintive howling...

Night Thoughts

I've been playing with this chord progression for the last few evenings:

|: EM7 | EM7 | Em/M7 | Em/M7 | C#dim | C#dim | C#dim | C#dim :|
|: G#7 | G#7 | G#7| G#7| C#m9 | C#m9 | C#m9 | C#m9 :| Gdim | Gdim | Gdim | Gdim :|

I'm not sure if the chords are exactly functioning the way I've described them, for there are many ways to think about the chords in the progression, but what I've written gives an approximation.  I played the first eight measures over an E pedal tone.

For the solos, I thought about the first eight bars as chords within G# harmonic minor (Ab made the chords harder to name), the first chord suggesting the sixth mode, the second chord suggesting some sort of hybrid of the sixth mode, and the third chord suggesting the seventh mode.  At times, I thought of the third chord as an inverted A7.  I used the G# Phrygian Dominant scale for the G#7, the C# pentatonic minor for the C#m9, and the Locrian #2 scale for the Gdim.

I used the Boss RC-2 Loop Station for the chords, my Eric Johnson stratocaster, my VOX amplifier, and all fingers for my picking attack.

I'm very happy with the mood of the piece and with the inventiveness of the solos.  These are my nocturnal meditations, my contemplations of Nyx for these last few nights.  Al Di Meola was definitely an influence on this one.