Lacking any concrete musical ideas recently, I decided to try and resurrect my atrophied improvisation abilities. A recurrent trait in my playing is that, after periods of less-than-diligent practice, I tend to “burble”. The technique is there, but the mental sharpness disappears, so my fingers seek out the comfortable, well-trodden routes.

So, having recorded a bass/drums/chords backing, I set about improvising a few solos, with the aim of editing, harmonising and generally arranging them into a supposedly “written” piece of music. This is an approach I love… Frank Zappa used it on numerous occasions. However, having started all that, I then got sidetracked by a thread on uk.music.guitar where a few people were jamming over a backing track and posting the results on Youtube. This seemed an ideal opportunity to investigate using iMovie to combine high-quality audio (recorded in Logic) with video clips from my compact digicam.

The resulting solo is a bit messy, but the experiment worked well enough to convince me that it’s a useable working method for future projects. In particular, I found some tips for optimising iPhoto projects destined for Youtube… thanks to Martin Backschat for being more patient than I could ever be (tips in handy visual form on Flickr).

Video on Youtube… Slow Gilmourish Jam