Music

An Instrument That I Want to Make

I’ve been playing my guitars on my lap using a slide a lot more. It’s fantastic. I make some truly disgusting sounds. As I’m playing, I noticed that how I interface with the guitar in this configuration, reminds me a lot of how I interact with Ableton’s Granulator.

With the Granulator, I move a cursor side to side across a digital audio buffer in order to launch the grains at the cursor’s specific point in time. With the slide guitar, I move the slide horizontally to control pitch, and by moving the slide up and down across the strings, I can control which strings are being impacted by the slide.