Jam over Am7 groove#
Recently I bought Creative Arpeggio Phrasing for Guitar by Greg Howe and tried some of the arpeggios in the book over a simple Am7 backing track.
Backing track by Guitar Improvisation (Creative Commons license).
Recording details#
The guitar effects are applied using Ardour. This video by SudoMetalStudio helped me to set up a nice distorted effect chain. I had many difficulties during the setup and sometimes it was just a single switch that was the reason for the muted sound.
My guitar is connected to an older generation of Focusrite Scarlett Solo, whose signal is processed by Ardour. Ardour can record sound but not video; it allows aligning video with sound later. I used OBS Studio for recording the video and used AV1 codec to minimize the video size.
Here is the script I use for AV1 encoding with FFmpeg:
[[ ! $# -eq 1 ]] && echo Usage: $0 VIDEO_FILE.ext && exit
OUT=$(echo ${1%.*}.webm)
echo Input: $1
echo Output: $OUT
echo
VIDEO_CODEC=libaom-av1
AUDIO_CODEC=libopus
ffmpeg -i "$1" -c:v $VIDEO_CODEC -c:a $AUDIO_CODEC "$OUT"