songblog

120 Ways Take 11

I can see clearly now

Over the holiday weekend, I did quite a bit of work on this piece, and I am now happy to say the form is finally set up.
Probably the most important element, that finally makes this work as a piece of music, was the writing of the verse undermelody. This was really what was holding me up on finishing the song.
I was letting the verse cycle back and forth, and listening to more presets, when I finally chanced upon a Thumb Piano sample.
When I heard this, I realized that what I actually wanted for this piece was a set of vibes - but of the thousands of presets that I have, there wasn't a single set of vibes anywhere that I could find! Startling!
So I end up back with the thumb piano.This ended up being a good starting point for the sound that I am finally using. Luckly for me I have a software editor for the XL7. It is a very powerful synth, but even with all the knobs on the front, its much easier to construct synth voices with the aid of a nice gui.
I spent quite some time on this, combining the thumb piano sample with a harp finally, and one of the amazing filters on the XL, plus some effects. What I ended up with sounds somewhat like a wide and deep and fuzzy thumb piano/vibraphone thing with some other nice overtones in it. Me like!
What is interesting to me is that the sound I made and the riffs give this piece - like so many of my pieces - a very slight 'oriental' tinge - and I am reminded how much I like Martin Denny - and if you don't know who he is (!) you can just jump over here and get to know a very cool musician indeed. And you really can't beat the album covers either.
One of the things that I try and do is to play the instruments that are emulated in my songs as they would actually be played, and the ersatz vibe I cooked up is no exception: I just used two note harmonic intervals, no three or four note chords to write the parts.
As I said, I was only going to use this on the verse, but as I played around with it more, I ended up writing a part for the refrain also. Now I'm in business, the song can be completed.
What I did find though, that I thought was interesting: even though I played all the vibe parts live, afterwards I went in a moved them forward in time about 20 ticks - this gave them a really laid back feel that I think works with the song. In case you are wondering, you can hear the refrain and the bridge by
clicking on this text for 120 ways test mix 3 and as usual, it would be better to save than stream.
At this point, I basically have the song under control. I need to play the little trumpet part that I had so much time in remembering, write the rest of the lyrics, and record all the final vocals, and the mastering.
According the Sonar, I am on revision 234, with about 23 hours of work on this song, which has been spread over a month. No wonder I can't finish my CD!!!! Still, I think I will be quite pleased when this is done, and hopefully a few others will be too.