Day #2

Yet another productive day.

We spent the morning crafting a song that is dear to me, and one of my favourites. After spending a significant portion of my life living in Sydney, Australia, my song styles and artistic direction inspired from the local music and geography. For example, this piece was inspired from the strong psychedelic rock scene from Australia, but also the abundant nature around Sydney. This song is slower, more peaceful, and does not follow the conventional structure of contemporary music. Depending on the version we hope to record, this song could be anywhere from 5 minutes to 14 minutes long. Lacking a chorus, this song is comprised of various verses, bridges, and refrains that are largely instrumental, and hope to both capture and emulate a particular feeling. My job for this song is not to create something that feels normal or conventional, but to evoke a certain sensation in the listener. I know not what people will feel when they hear the tune, but if they feel something, then I have succeeded. A more ambitious song than others on our album, it has several parts, and in a way acts like three separate songs that seamlessly flow into the others. I finished the first third of the song, laying down four different guitar tracks, two leads, one rhythm, and one acoustic, and finished it off with vocals.
The remainder of the day comprised of me programming horn and string samples to be used on several of our original material. Given that we do not have access to an orchestras or brass ensembles any time soon, some software lent to me by a friend fixed this issue. The software allows me to create string soundscapes and horn lines on a computer, and after hours of slowly tinkering away at the darn thing, I managed to make one of our songs sound like we had a whole concert hall of instruments backing us up. One issue with this software is the recurring issue of sounds that are of pristine quality, that will not fit into our classic rock inspired music. By duplicating all of the string and horn arrangements and running half of them through a lo-fi emulator, I was able to slightly reduce the quality of the samples, yet keep some sharpness of the sound without having it sound too distorted or muddy. I hope to explore this software even further and continue to improve my knowledge in this new field of music.