getting high on my own supply - 2. "tigerbeat"
episode 2: "tigerbeat” (spring 2007)
i got my first guitar for my sixteenth birthday. it was a black and white ibanez stratocaster copy that came with a tuner, a cable, a very small practice amp, and a handful of picks. the low e string was very buzzy (i think the nut was loose that's what she said) which led me to not really play many power chords, the natural for the rockist electric guitar novice (i also felt (don't really still feel) they lacked a certain richness—i loved the ramones and people would always talk about how it was just power chords but listening to their records it felt wrong, no, there are other notes, this sounds more colorful than just the first and the fifth).
i've always thought of myself (still think of myself) as an electric guitar player first, but if you are a straight man at college you're legally required to own an acoustic guitar and i learned that i did really like fingerpicking as a kind of meditative activity. i think most guitarists have certain patterns their hands naturally seem to fall into. most of the way i learned to play guitar was not learning actual songs (which would have been too "homework" to me) but just kind of mindlessly plinging around as my mind wandered.
for whatever reason, this is the particular "acoustic guitar instrumental" thing that felt most pleasing to my hands and thus, because i enjoy easy pleasure, is the pattern they would fall into—at this point, i had probably been playing it on guitar for a year. the initial part of the riff feels like a monkey swinging between ropes to my hands and then a long double stop slide from high up on the b and g strings down to the root and then back up high for some twelfth fret harmonics (most of these songs i couldn't play now but i still play this core loop). i felt that the acoustic guitar itself wasn't sonically interesting enough so i added some forest field recording i had downloaded (which i think is why i titled it that?) and more live percussion on not percussion instruments and jagged os mutantes-inspired electric guitar and then a mellotron female choir (my mind blown by the fact that on my computer i now had things that were called soundfonts, free multi-velocity samples of real acoustic instruments, realizing that in my boring black dell computer in the corner of my bedroom all i had to do was download a file and my studio now had the instrument that played the riff in "strawberry fields forever", the aura of the tape leaking through into the digital (watch paul mccartney play one)
