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Sadly, there will be no demo attached quite yet. I’m very much in the planning stages. I have two separate harmonic movements that will link up, as well as an idea of where I’m putting the section Evan sent to me.
D-G-B(flat)
C-E(flat)-G
Very simple, yes, and rather typical in terms of my chordal thinking. But a lot of room for melody and accompaniment. Presently, I have it scaled back to two percussion tracks, a single electric guitar and bass.
The guitar and bass will probably play the root notes with occasional harmonic tinkering. Meanwhile, the meter of the piece will be bounce between 4/4 and 5/4, I haven’t charted it out quite yet. Should be interesting. I’d rather write to the words than my usual practice of writing words to pre-recorded music.
The drums are brisk and insistent, and already I imagine them floating in and out of the rhythmic emphasis.
Should have demo up by end of the weekend, as well as some charts?
Fun.
My little booth! Check out those Quadratic Residue Diffusers! Whoa!
-Evan
[11/21/08]Finished with a first mix of Napping Study! I’ll edit this post later with more text and perhaps a photo, but for now I wanted to try out posting a link for the file of said mix. Here’s a go!
Click Here!
[11/26/08] UPDATE: This is one of the first pieces I’ve felt good about in a while. I had an actual deadline for it, so it forced me to move quickly and without much thought.
The audio engineering school I go to had a mandatory recording/mixdown project last week, so I decided to write a piece that would use violin (Suzuki trained fiancee!). The recording session was done on a Netoek Elite console to 2-inch tape (Otari MTR-90). The mixdown was done on a Neve VR with Flying Faders.
Composition: Sat down with Logic and my MIDI controller in my apartment. Found a virtual instrument I didn’t mind, and made a sustained, slowing evolving chord progression. I then proceeded to sing over that chord progression. Ended up using four takes, some of them recorded in relation to the other voices, some just singing against the synth drone. My favorite harmonic moments were accidental because of this chance-oriented recording process.
I then strip-silenced the vocals, and began editing. Noting parts I wanted to rerecord for a better performance, deleting unintelligibly dissonant regions, and nudging the regions around to play with timing issues. This I found fun! I also edited the synth drone so it was only moving from single note drone to single note drone, making it into more of a cello continuo part rather than accompaniment. I decided that that would be my violin part. I thus tweaked and automated the vocals until I was at least mildly satisfied, went and did my recording and mixdown sessions, and finished the piece. Took about 2 and half weeks, which for me is astounding. I rarely work this fast and rarely come up with something that actually expands upon a single IDEA for longer than one minute. (Granted its only 3:01, but still…).
Mxing on the Neve VR
The title, though! Has nothing to do with the words, which were improvised. Usually when I first start working on a piece, I get tired and cranky pretty fast. I start second guessing and my frame of reference turns against me and the piece. This happened with Napping Study during the editing stage, before the vocals had really taken any definite shape and were still 4 stems of improvised vocals sort of in the same tonal area. So. I got tired, and instead of plowing through, decided to lie down and nap. The music was gentle and droning, so I put the whole piece on repeat, lay down, and napped. Whenever I would drift awake for a moment, I would catch different places of the piece. And it was always pleasant and unobtrusive. Much like the ambient music I’ve experienced, but this piece least had the feeling of MOVEMENT since the voices were constantly exploring new twists to similar melodic lines, presenting counter melodies, or simply doo-ing randomly for sake of it. Whereas the repetition of much of the ambient music I’ve encountered creates an emotional detachment with its almost mechanical repetitions or rhythmic free-flowingness yet pitch-content-constricted improvisatory-free-floating-ness (nothing that I would begrudge it for, since even Eno describes it as wallpaper), I heard a potential in the piece to be something slightly different. Wallpaper that interacts with your sense of musical movement; from Point A to Point B. But because a napper experiences the piece as a whole and also in bits and pieces (consciously and subconsciously), hopefully the listener continues to move towards Point B until he stops repeating the piece.
Perhaps I am using too many words. I am excited that I found a context IN THE WORLD for this piece! So please listen to this piece whenever and however you would like, but if you ever want to nap or simply rest your eyes, put this on quietly. Maybe there’s too much movement! It might keep you awake. Who knows!
Nevertheless, it’s done! Back to working with my little 1 minute pieces! Please feel free to ask questions or let me know how you found the piece. My brain makes me hear the piece in a pretty specific way.
