spanking the plank

Hi all, typically manic here at GCHQ as we've a few projects on the go this month and very little down time. That said I've grabbed 5 mins over a morning cuppa to fill you in on some of the guitar-based mangling we've just finished for the next issue of Computer Music.

This months theme was electric and acoustic guitars so we thought we'd really throw ourselves into our stack of stomp boxes and FX to coax some odd tones and soundscapes out of a nice range of guitars we blagged off various mates.

First effect up for mangling is the digitech talker, rather than a traditional talkbox with the tube to bung in your gob, this little box of tricks has inputs for both the guitar and a standard mic. Us being us we soon lost the mic input and instead fed it a beat from a number of our drum machines which when combined with the distorted guitar input (the plain stomp box in the pic above is a handmade vintage-style distortion made for us by our mucker Cyclick) gives a great array of robotic rhythms.

Next stomp that got loads of use was the above Barge Concepts feedback looper. Basically this nifty box sends the output signal from another stompbox back into its input causing a fully adjustable feedback loop that makes the stompbox go nuts. This can then be blended with the original and effected signal to create all sorts of feedback and self oscillation madness. Above you can see it used with the Line 6 delay pedal.

Of course the mooger fooger set up got a battering as well with the new control processor box binding it all together controlling various parameters like frequency sweep and LFO speed.

As usual we've uploaded a small taster of the sort of things we got up to for you to download here at our soundcloud page.