
#4 Bolero Un-Raveled - a fretless ambient guitar jam at the edge of summer (feat. Zoia & friends)
Published at : October 23, 2021
Measurements at the Event Horizon - a fretless ambient guitar jam at the edge of summer.
#4 Bolero Un-Raveled - a nod to the famous classical piece in ambient context.
NB: Sorry about the clipping in the left channel, tried to fix it - couldn't.
These are outtakes from a single jam I had at the Black Sea coast in late August 2021. The location had an instant appeal to my ambient passions. Cape Emine is actually the tip of the Balkan, the very edge where the Old Mountain ends and meets the Black Sea. The cliff is rather steep and majestic, the sea bellow is turquoise blue-green (pity I couldn't quite capture it here). There were virtually no humans that particular evening, only a few wild horses, donkeys and seagulls. A passer-by eventually approached me and asked, looking at the machinery on my board, what I was measuring. "The horizon" I answered. Hence the title of the jam.
I had only a couple of hours away from my family at my disposal and basically kept playing until the battery of my portable board went dead. Later on I decided to cut and stitch together some of the pieces that seemed to make sense.
The technicalities:
The sound was recorded direct from my pedalboard to my camera. Nothing was added to the original audio apart from some EQ and compression in post to normalize the sound. All synth and drum sounds were coming from my iPad (which had to be out of frame for ease of handling). I was running a number of apps: Guitar2Midi for audio to midi tracking, Eventide plugins for the guitar, TardiGrain, SampleTank, DecentSampler, Rhodes for synth and sample sounds, SoftDrummer for drums, AUM for mixing. In other words, the ambient effects came mostly from Zoia and Specular Tempus, all synths were following my guitar playing, the drums were played by a drum-machine and their intensity was adjusted on the go.
For the real nerds:
The guitar is a heavily customized Harley Benton CST-24 converted to fretless, fitted with a DIY infinite sustainer and other cool stuff.
The signal chain goes:
Guitar / Mic (& Arturia MicroFreak, not used here) -- Behringer MX400 mini-mixer -- Digitech FreqOut -- DOD Looking Glass -- Harley Benton American Sound -- Hotone Wally Plus looper -- Orange Omec Teleport (USB-interface) -- iPad Pro -- Empress Zoia -- GFI Systems Specular Tempus -- Zoom Q2n-4K portable camera. All that is powered by Joyo JP-05 mobile power-bank.
Some of the Zoia patches used are: QuarkStream, Loop Forest, Lo Fi Bliss.
Thanks for watching and reading this! Please like and subscribe if you are interested in ambient stuff, music-making on the go and diy music instruments
#4 Bolero Un-Raveled - a nod to the famous classical piece in ambient context.
NB: Sorry about the clipping in the left channel, tried to fix it - couldn't.
These are outtakes from a single jam I had at the Black Sea coast in late August 2021. The location had an instant appeal to my ambient passions. Cape Emine is actually the tip of the Balkan, the very edge where the Old Mountain ends and meets the Black Sea. The cliff is rather steep and majestic, the sea bellow is turquoise blue-green (pity I couldn't quite capture it here). There were virtually no humans that particular evening, only a few wild horses, donkeys and seagulls. A passer-by eventually approached me and asked, looking at the machinery on my board, what I was measuring. "The horizon" I answered. Hence the title of the jam.
I had only a couple of hours away from my family at my disposal and basically kept playing until the battery of my portable board went dead. Later on I decided to cut and stitch together some of the pieces that seemed to make sense.
The technicalities:
The sound was recorded direct from my pedalboard to my camera. Nothing was added to the original audio apart from some EQ and compression in post to normalize the sound. All synth and drum sounds were coming from my iPad (which had to be out of frame for ease of handling). I was running a number of apps: Guitar2Midi for audio to midi tracking, Eventide plugins for the guitar, TardiGrain, SampleTank, DecentSampler, Rhodes for synth and sample sounds, SoftDrummer for drums, AUM for mixing. In other words, the ambient effects came mostly from Zoia and Specular Tempus, all synths were following my guitar playing, the drums were played by a drum-machine and their intensity was adjusted on the go.
For the real nerds:
The guitar is a heavily customized Harley Benton CST-24 converted to fretless, fitted with a DIY infinite sustainer and other cool stuff.
The signal chain goes:
Guitar / Mic (& Arturia MicroFreak, not used here) -- Behringer MX400 mini-mixer -- Digitech FreqOut -- DOD Looking Glass -- Harley Benton American Sound -- Hotone Wally Plus looper -- Orange Omec Teleport (USB-interface) -- iPad Pro -- Empress Zoia -- GFI Systems Specular Tempus -- Zoom Q2n-4K portable camera. All that is powered by Joyo JP-05 mobile power-bank.
Some of the Zoia patches used are: QuarkStream, Loop Forest, Lo Fi Bliss.
Thanks for watching and reading this! Please like and subscribe if you are interested in ambient stuff, music-making on the go and diy music instruments

BoleroUn-Raveledfretless