Ambient Frippertronics Acoustic Guitar with MS-20 Mini

Published on Dec 19, 2016 Stephen Hummel

"Episode 3 of the 'Circuits and Strings' series from subtractiveLAD aka: Stephen Hummel.

I wanted to try a Frippertronics-style jam but using an acoustic guitar, instead of the more conventional electric guitar.

My Taylor 310ce is electroacoustic so I am able to patch it directly into my pedalboard, which can be pretty inspiring. I have tuned the Taylor to DADGAD. For this performance I have the guitar running into my Ernie Ball VP Jr, then into the Strymon TimeLine and then into the Walrus Audio Descent reverb pedal. My pedalboard is then patched directly to my Boss RE-20 Space Echo, which is functioning as my tape looper for this jam. The Space Echo is set to a delay time of somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 seconds to achieve the looping effect. During the performance, you will see me shifting the parameters of the Descent with an expression pedal and tweaking the settings on the TimeLine and Space Echo to achieve various spacial effects. I performed an overdub on the Korg MS-20 Mini to add low frequency accents - the synth is also going through the Space Echo but used only as a simple delay. Some additional mixing/subtle processing was done in Reaper."