Category: Experiments

A snippet of ukelele thru wild FX

Here’s a snippet of “Kitty alone,” a traditional kid’s song from Appalachia with a haunting melody and slightly surreal lyrics, on the ukelele and through the Empress Reverb and Echosystem.

Featuring a totally normal bedroom with an ultranormal amount of pedals.

Shot by Sandy Zelazy (AKA Silver Reeds). We actually spent nearly the whole time singing and playing acoustically into a single mic, believe it or not, that’ll get a more official release down the road.

Using a phone as a banjo pickup

Chrissy soldered a mic wire onto an old phone receiver – and it sounds great on vocals – but more recently Tim’s been experimenting with using it to pick up banjo and sent it through pedals.

Here’s how it sounds in action – running the banjo input an Empress Reverb and Echosystem in this video, then a little Rat and Tubescreamer distortion and (at the end) a Boss Slicer.

The banjo riff is the chords to the traditional folksong “Nottamun Town” as we do it, and which Bob Dylan used for his song “Masters of War.”

Twisting knobs is fun

Chrissy has a new touchsynth. The arc of pandemic musicking seems to bend inevitably towards us just becoming an experimental electronic duo, presumably while changing the name of the project to Witchwire.

For the nerds who want to know how this is being made:

Chrissy is playing the Hyve TouchSynth.

It’s being fed through an Empress Reverb pedal, with a bit of delay on the side from the Empress Echosystem and distortion from the Proco Lil’ Rat and a Caline Tubescreamer clone.

The Boss Slicer is the green thing that’s chopping up the signal into harmonic/rhythmic patterns.

Things get cooler ~1min in, when Tim remembers to turn on the Orange Micro Dark amp, which – confusingly – is purple. Before that, everything was coming out of the Orange Micro Terror amp, which is, of course, orange. And white.