Alright! Got a long one for you to download today. In continuation from yesterday’s posting on improv sessions from March 2005, I’ve got one that basically amounts to a one-man jam festival that cycles through a variety of tempos, styles and experiences. It’s well worth the download.
So let’s get started by downloading this jam session that I created back on March 19, 2005 - part six. It’s nearly an eleven-minute song, so be prepared to wait a bit. 
0:00 - I set it up with a kinda fun, schwanky combination of tennis ball and finger drum action followed by some basting brush hi-hat action.
0:24 - add a little bed of music to play against here at this point and a little playful lead line to follow, which eventually gets added to the loop
1:13 - with my octave pedal, I bring in the bass line to give some nice low end to this funkified groove and bring the melody line back in immediately once the bass line has been established
1:50 - I LOVE… L-O-V-E love distorting my acoustic guitar just enough to give it an edge that you just don’t hear from acoustic guitars. It adds dimension and variety from your normal acoustic tone AND doesn’t quite have the same tone from your run-of-the-mill electric guitars. It’s unique, and I love it.
3:30 - After the driving distortion, we bring back in the acoustic to add some lines that help tone it back a bit and introduce some more syncopation and ethnicity.
4:47 - And after doing some natural octave playing, I bring in the octave pedal again and drop the lower octave down even one more level for kicks. Remember this is just about playing around. There is no right or wrong, just diving in and doing. That’s what improv is to me.
5:40 - At this point I’m ready to change it up, so I’m slowing down the tone and fading out the pattern to prepare for a new canvas to work with. For continuity and the illusion of another loop, I repeat the pattern until about 6:31 where I start up a new loop pattern.
7:21 - And one of the more unusual uses of an ebow: on the acoustic guitar. I bring the ebow in to lay down an eerie drone and start layering that around 7:55 to give this ebb and flow of tone.
8:14 - I bring in an established tempo with my basting brush and finger snare to give me enough structure, before I bring in the bass at 9:04-ish.
9:44 - I’ve got my loop fully built out by now and am just playing around with the tension and building of the notes to try and create some unusual progressions that normally don’t fall under my status-quo. And after messing around with that for a bit, I begin to draw it back at 10:48 and fade out the recording. I can’t recall how much further it went on, but I think just shy of 11:00 was good for me.
This tune illustrates the flexibility and challenge with improv instrumental acoustic tunes — the challenge of how one can take a starting concept, make it evolve, and then completely transform it midway through to take it a completely different direction than when you first started. The thing that’s difficult to be aware of is when to say “when” and move on. I remember reading an interview with Phish’s former front man Trey Anastasio and the discussion he had about knowing when to stop trying to force something to happen and just ending the song. Sometimes you just run out of gas, and it no longer becomes interesting trying to force out what you don’t have at that moment in time.
In this case, this piece had plenty of gas to go the distance and lasted a while.