A month ago, I was at the Life In Balance CD release party at the Quiet Storm coffeehouse along with Jeff Kowal and Ben Cox, and it was quite a nice evening, although it was also the first night of the Evil Cold which claimed my voice for the following week. At one point, Life in Balance's Steve Sciulli bantered with the audience, and someone made The Ironic Song Request for Skynyrd's "Freebird." People chuckled, and Jeff said to me (ironically), "you know, I'd like to hear you remix the guitar solo from 'Freebird.'" Being the obstinate, perverse type I am, I thought, yeah, that would be interesting. So I did it.
The general approach was to go through the song, find loopable snippets, and then organize them in Ableton Live into different combinations I can flip between as scenes. The original idea was to capture a live performance of it, although the show I first did it at had sub-optimal monitoring, so I stayed up a bit later once I got home and did the canonical version. One variation went one iteration too long, so I edited down the two-track result. It begins ambient, and then gradually adds more signature licks until it's obvious what we're dealing with. Parts of it sound like Glenn Branca guitar-army stuff; others sound like brain-damaged boogie. Mr. Funky points out it's kind of like the guitar afficionado version of what breakbeat folks do. It was fun.
Ironically, when I ran the piece by Jeff, he didn't recognize the source. A month had passed, and he hadn't expected me to do this. An entertainment lawyer's pointed out that I can't sell this, but you can hear "Red Fiber" for nothing. Enjoy. (And if you find it interesting, drop me a line.)
