"My cover version of the Theme from Shaft, the 1971 groundbreaking action movie. It stars my 8 year old German Shepherd "Jasmine". I played the funky rhythm guitar part on a bowed instrument called an "igil" (pronounced eh-GIL). It is a traditional bowed instrument from the country of Tuva, and is traditionally used to accompany Tuvan Throat Singing. I play it a little differently though :)
I tried to stick close to the original song, and I recorded all the backing tracks on keyboards with the help of Jasmine. Once I got this percussive bowing technique down, I was going to record a kind of funky electronic original. Every time I tried to describe the sound I was getting to someone, I'd eventually say: it's kind of like the wacka-wacka guitar sound, like from the song "Shaft". So I thought what the heck, I dig that song, so I decided to do my own cover of it... a tribute to the great Isaac Hayes and a tune that broke a lot of ground, making Isaac Hayes the first African-American composer to win an Academy Award.
A couple years ago I was trying to learn a kind of rhythmic bowing style from a video of Tuvan master igil player and singer Kaigal-ool Khovalyg of the band Huun Huur Tu. Using this igil (made by Aldar Tamdyn of the group Chirgilchin) along with a handmade wooden bow he made, I tried learning Kaigal-ool's bowing style, but being new to it, the bow bounced around a lot all over the place, which is not what it supposed to do.
I kind of liked the percussive nature this produced, but it wasn't very rhythmic and hard to control, so I set out on trying to get a handle on it and see if I could control it and use it for something down the road. After some months of messing around with it, I got so I could keep a pretty good syncopated beat, though it works best using the crude handmade bow, because it is much heavier than the Erhu bows that most igils are played with, and it also has some flex to it. The bowhair on this bow is made of fine nylon strands (as are the strings on the igil) so they flex more than horsehair which my other bows are made of. Plus I'm bouncing more towards the middle of the neck, so I get more bounce than closer to the bridge, where you'd usually bow.
So basically what's happening is that every time I make a full downstroke and upstroke, the bow is flexing bouncing off the strings 4 times. So in this song it's bouncing and scratching on the strings 480 times per minute, or 4 times per beat, or every time you hear the cymbal hi-hat."
Added (and performed) by oddmusic