Following on from my last post, I went back to my May Hauptbahnhof recording and created another experimental piece. 

This time I tried combining the train station ambience with some acoustic guitar playing. I really haven't played much guitar at all since I've been in Berlin. I was encouraged to try doing something with open tunings by the boyfriend of one of my girlfriend's colleagues. He's a much better guitarist than me, that's for sure. On a night out (and over some beers) we got into a music theory chat (really him explaining some theory to me). It actually helped my understanding of the instrument (a little bit). 

So anyway it reinvigorated my interest in the instrument. I actually have no idea what tuning I had my guitar in for this recording. As you might hear if you listen to the Soundcloud recording (Berlin HBF May#3) there was some music playing at the station. I was in part trying to get a sequence of notes that would work on top of that. So the tuning was all just by ear. 

Let's see. I can figure out right now what the tuning is. I broke my high E string the other week (and haven't replaced the strings yet), hence there only being 5 notes:

1. G (down tuned from E - Godflesh eat your heart out!)
2. G (1 step down)
3. A# (2 steps down - I think. I'm not very good at this)
4. D (2 ½ steps down?)
5. A (1 step down)

Well, that does look like quite a strange tuning to me. It gave me some nice sounds though. Also I just realised that I was extremely sharp. So if anyone ever wants to play along, it'll be a right pain in the bottom. 

Well hey, I finally sat down to spend some time making music (well “sounds” would be more accurate). 

After making some field recordings at Berlin Hauptbahnhof, I first fiddled around with them on Ableton (adding effects and generally warping the sounds), then tried playing some melodies on my MPKmini.

Well in a fit of inspiration today I went back into the tracks and played around with the MIDI parts. Spent a couple of hours playing around with that and posted them on Soundcloud. 

So if you're curious, you can check them out there. Just click on the Soundcloud icon. It's the icon at the top of the page furthest to the right.