King Never Manifesto

The King Never Manifesto

The original idea behind the King Never project was to document the "ambient/experimental" aspects of my guitar playing. Although some of these ideas were explored live with Able Cain, the results were never recorded (expect for the brief loop outro on "Charlatan's Song" from Able Cain's debut CD Ep).

Looping is a composition or improvosation technique whereby musical phrases are recorded into a long digital delay line, repeats the phrases indefinitely. Additional parts are overdubbed over the original phrase in realtime. This allows the player to react and interact with phrases he/she just played.

Expect for a crude map or basic theme, the King Never loops are entirely improvised and recorded live. I've found that any attempt to refine the loops (by overdubbing or erasing parts) is destined to failure...as the original charm and haphazard character of the pieces are forever lost. Are these loops perfect? No. Can they be duplicated in a live setting? Perhaps, but not likely. They stand merely as an accurate representation of the time period in which they were recorded. The King Never loops start with one of my Peavey guitars and a Digitech GSP-2101 tube preamp/processor (for the "basic" tone). The output of the Digitech is routed into a Mackie 1604 mixer and then into a Lexicon JamMan (with 32 second upgrade) where the signal is looped. The loop is then processed with an Alesis Quadraverb. For recording purposes the "live" and "looped" guitar signals are fed into an Alesis ADAT. The King Never live rig (see photo at right) currently includes: Digitech GSP-2101, Lexicon JamMan and Vortex, Rane SM-82, Alesis RA-100, and EV-12L's in custom enclosures. (March 1996 and photo 1997)