Second Square To None

  Phil Dunne - Airport Duck (Original) by SSTN Strings

This week's piece features guitar experimentation from Phil Dunne of Dublin instrumental band Groundburst. Check out their EP, "Everything I didn't say and all the things I wanted to", available on Bandcamp.

Tell us a little about your musical background ie influences, formative experiences, bands you play/played in.

The first music that I got absolutely obsessed about was English breakbeat hardcore and jungle in the early 90's. At the time I had a typically teenaged I dea to form a "rave band" with a schoolmate (Ian McDonnell, or Eomac of Lakker). Started playing the guitar around '95 after hearing acts like The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers etc using guitars in their electronic music and thought I would pick up my dads old acoustic and see if I could come up with anything. Once I got my own electric and discovered rock it became pretty all-consuming!


My early influences at this time would have been people like Hendrix, Tom Morello, Jonny Greenwood, Adam Jones; guys who were into getting radically different sounds out of the guitar rather than merely playing pentatonic scales (although I loved them too!). I especially liked the way Morello got wild electronic sounds out of the instrument by using extended playing techniques rather than just using loads of pedals. That love of the tactile quality of the guitar and how you could manipulate the strings in any way you chose really became something I started to explore. Since the guitar allows you direct access to the strings (rather than keyboard instruments where you press a key, essentially a button, to move the strings for you), it provides the ability to produce a wide variety of textures and timbres.

Pretty soon after getting an electric, I formed an electronic band called Undermine with some school-friends and recorded and gigged with them for the next few years. Since the band was primarily writing electronic music, I invested in loads of pedals and tried to come up with atypical guitar sounds to fit into the electronic sound-scape. While I loved the pedals, I didn't want to rely totally on them for creating the sounds and this was where I started doing things like using primitive tapping techniques and using slides to create bowed sounds.

After Undermines eventual demise, I started working occasionally with my brother Simon; and this led eventually (through various personnel and stylistic changes) to the formation of my current band Groundburst. Since I had been playing in a sequenced band, I had to work on my playing quite a bit to get it up to scratch for performing with a live band. Because of this, I initially ditched most of my pedals in favour of playing in a more chops oriented style. After a while though, the pedals slowly began to creep back in and I found I was better able to implement some of the techniques that my heroes had been doing but that were beyond my ability beforehand.

Describe your process of music-making/composition. Is this piece (ie the one submitted to SSTN) typical of this process?

My approach to composition is firmly centred around the guitar. I usually try to approach the instrument with an empty mind and just play around with things until a basic idea starts to form. This can be related to an effect or timbre that I stumble upon, a melody or a chord sequence. I then usually work at it occasionally and try and allow it to lead me to some eventual conclusion. I spent some time travelling a few years ago and brought an acoustic guitar with me and got heavily into unusual chord voicings and long chordal sequences as a result. I will often record ideas and use Cubase to arrange them and allow me to either program melodies or record other guitar parts over the initial idea. I use Cubase mainly as a recording medium as the majority of my compositions end up being worked on and recorded with by the band, so I don't really go in for a lot of programming or sound design.

This piece is a fairly atypical example of my usual working methods, actually. It was written in Kerry, in the summer of 2007, during a week I spent in a rented cottage writing music. I was working on quite a dense and intricate piece for the band that involved lots of chord charts and odd meters and was taking a long time to work out. As a reaction to this, I sat down with the guitar one afternoon and tried to do something much simpler and improvised. I came up with the initial melody and the sound using the guitars volume knob to take all the attack out of the sound. Since I didn't have a computer with me, I used a looping pedal to record the initial theme; and them overdubbed a slide part and some textural bits over it. The piece doesn't actually loop, I merely used the pedal as a hard disc recorder due to my lack of any other recording medium. The whole piece came together very quickly (I think the main theme is the 3rd take I tried. The first two ended with me hitting some bum notes so I discarded them). I liked the resulting piece so much that I decided it was a perfect foil for the very complicated piece I was working on and left it at that. I found the experience of writing like this very liberating and have used this approach a couple of other times. I have since worked up a version of this tune with the band and we are currently gigging it with a view to recording it later in the year.

This recording was made by playing the pedal through a clean Vox AC30 amp and recording it using a Rode Stereo pair.

What sort of equipment (e.g. computer, hardware, home made gear, instruments etc.) do you use to make your sounds?

All the sounds I use come from the guitar. My main guitar is an early '90's Ibanez RG 550 that I bought second hand when I was 18. I was into a lot of rock music at the time and this reflected my choice of this very heavy-rock oriented piece of kit. Later on I replaced the pickups and put a cut-off switch and coil taps on both humbuckers and this made the instrument so versatile that I haven't found anything to replace it as my main guitar yet. I'm pretty attached to this particular guitar and it's a major part of my sound. I have recently started using a Fender Jaguar as well though, which I have again modified quite a bit and is great for sweet sounding clean things or for really noisey stuff!!

For amplification, I use a slightly overdriven Vox AC30: except for recording purposes, the amp stays on pretty much the same settings, which is predominantly clean, but with a little bit of grit when I dig in, a kind of "phlegmy" sound. I then use pedals and extended playing techniques to colour the sound. Pedals include delay, reverb, fuzz, wah, whammy and the looping pedal.

Info on upcoming gigs, preferred web address, releases etc.

No solo gigs planned for the moment, however, I will be playing this piece with Groundburst in the Thomas House next Saturday June 26th.

I'll also hopefully be recording an album with Groundburst later in the year and plan to include this piece on it.

www.myspace.com/groundburst
groundburst.bandcamp.com