Lotus Feet (John McLaughlin cover)

One of my first quarantine tasks was to disentangle the muddle of cables which, over the years, had rendered my guitar synth and loopers all but unplayable.

This is one of my favourite pieces to play with the guitar synth. Although it first appeared on a Mahavishnu Orchestra album, the most beautiful versions out there come from McLaughlin’s Shakti performances. Here, I use an acoustic guitar sound (on a Boss pedal, not the synth) to put down the guitar backing, then some glockenspiel, sitar and tabla to get it moving, and finally a flute sound for the melody.

I was going to do it as a Facebook Live, but there’s so much can go wrong – not just the actual playing but hitting the loop pedal at the right time, selecting the right voice, not feeding the melody into the looper – that I’m too much of a coward to try it.

So here it is – hope you enjoy it.