In The Branches - Traveling Back Through Time (Ambient Guitar - Deep Ambient - Drone - Live Looping) 

Thank you, Marti! I really appreciate it.

You're welcome and thank you for listening & commenting.

Thank you again! Cheers from Oregon

Thank you! I appreciate it

Thanks Matty. I use my pedals very experimentally and go purely off of how things sound, rarely remembering how I make a particular tone (to my own detriment at times). Pretty sure Cloud and Hall dominate my saved presets. I will say that I almost never use 100% wet, unless I'm transitioning my looper speed/direction. Hope that helps.

@@InTheBranchesOfficial ok. Last question. If you can give me any tip at all it would make guitar playing so much more enjoyable. I have every pedal u can think of. My question is specifically in this track...the begining drone sound. Is that a loop of multiple notes being played into a wash of reverb? Or is that a synth? Desperately trying to get a similar sound. (just the drone ..). Those long drones are my absolute favorite. Alright. Had to ask ..I don't know anyone else who does this that I communicate with. 🙏

@@LoVeAmBiEnT You can ask as many questions as you want. The problem is, my workflow with ITB is very experimental and improvised. When someone asks how I made a certain sound, I often have no idea. I really can't say for sure how I made the intro drone to this song, other than the usual improvised riffs running at different speeds and in different directions, on top of each other. To make things more complicated, I sometimes use the Strymon Volante looper, which is quite different from the TimeLine looper (three speeds instead of two, no undo function that I know of). I can sometimes go back to the original live recordings and hear how the loop(s) began, letting me deconstruct the ingredients, but it's often too much work. I would only be able to take a guess at how to do it again. That's part of the appeal of making this music: Less analysis, less rigid work, less left-brain thinking than my other projects. Just improvisation and natural instinct, layered together during recording and sometimes layered more afterwards. For example, one loop running at double-speed on top of the same loop running reverse half-speed, piled on top of each other in Adobe Audition. I can try to dig through the source recordings and find clues to how that particular sound was made, but it usually turns into quite a job (and I still can't see the pedal settings, which are continuously being modified throughout each recording). If it's any consolation for my crappy answer, the mystery can make things more enjoyable than "revealing the magic trick." Lol. When I get back in the studio (soon) I'll see if I can figure out how to emulate that intro drone and let you know what I find.

@@InTheBranchesOfficial I gotcha. Ok so you record stems into your computer also. (for some reason I just thought you did everything like how you did it in the "sky patterns" video (which was awesome ...I watch that alot ...the shot in the mirror was perfect for that ). That makes sense. It's not really any settings I'm after. Just technique I guess. That steady drone sound ... I'll try first using a volume pedal and record short snippets of intervals swelled in ...so it continuously loops.. then I'll layer a few on top of each other with the big sky in cloud mode. You really do nail all those sounds so perfectly ...honestly. It must feel nice to write music that captures what you are trying to express so perfectly .also. I've been trying to do everything w out the computer ... So I guess I'll have to open up a daw and just go for it ... U probably have to or else everything will end the same (example if you have the big sky at the end then everything will be going through it on one specific algorithm). So ya. A DAW would solve that problem. I just need to think a little more outside the box .. but hey. Feel free to dive in and maybe discover how you did that. Drones are the best. Just that bed of ambience to noodle over . Thanks for taking the time to answer my question. It gets frustrating sometimes when I want to make certain sounds and have no idea how to do it. Alright. Thanks Shane !!!!!

@@LoVeAmBiEnT I sometimes layer loops on the computer later, but most songs are done like Sky Patterns (layered live) as you thought. I use computers 50+ hours a week for work and biz stuff, so I really try to avoid them in my music workflow. In the case of Traveling Back Through Time, the loops were very minimalist on their own, so I tried out stacking them in a DAW, and that was the result. So there are no hard rules; I'm always trying out different things with whatever I have available. The new challenge these days is option paralysis, which happens when we have so many options that we get lost in them. In that context, limitations can be the key to unlocking creativity, i.e. the opposite of endlessly cycling through presets or troubleshooting problems with complex chains of effects. You probably already know this, but I have to remind myself of these things as I get tempted to acquire "more than too much" gear.