Eternal Branching | Solo Electric Guitar | David John Roche

Eternal Branching is a piece for solo electric guitar. It is developed from my concerto The Curse of the Bedroom Guitarist - written for the wonderful CoMA London during my time as Composer in Residence - and requires the performer to make use of a delay effect (alongside chorus and reverb)
to create a seemingly endless pattern of repeating pitches from each note the guitarist plays (the titular eternal branching). There are plenty of examples of this in popular repertoire, The Temper Trap's fantastic 2008 one-hit wonder "Sweet Disposition" being mine.

Reverb and chorus can give an ambient, blurred sheen to the resultant rhythm created with the delay and the challenge for the guitarist is to maintain a strong and clear staccato throughout most of the piece - providing the sonic space and strength for the relatively simple arpeggiated patterns they must play to be heard. In the final bars, I manipulate the dotted quaver pattern of the delay to create a metric modulation. This is something that will be heard and performed very different depending on the performer's delay - a fun dice roll to close the piece.

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