Progressive Rock Artist seeks Audience
I need to stop messing about and get serious about completing these songs and then releasing them. Starting now.
Okay, the first track on the album will be a slow, instrumental orchestral-type thing that builds to a crescendo and segues into the first “real” song.
The demos were titled “The Great Escape” and so that is what it is called.
Cloud Chamber is the first completed track of a suite of instrumentals, a side-project which I have tentatively dubbed “Maxwell Tangent’s Divergent Thinking”. Musically it’s ambient, techno, loop-based instrumental music with plenty of guitars and processed natural sounds. But it’s early days, it could end up going in a different direction. I hope to have each track segue seamlessly into the next one in order to make one long piece of music. So far the tracks are being written in reverse order, because Cloud Chamber is the final movement.
I was working on this track on the later half of 2001, and therefore I’ve dedicated it to the victims of the World Trade Center attack in September 2001.
Last night I finished the first draft of my fugue. I say first draft because there are still a few notes that I am not happy with. In isolation each voice sounds consistent but all together… well there are some, not dischords exactly, but places I might be able to polish.
Eldest Brother asked me how I composed (did I use score?) so I figured I’d describe the process. Basically I have four MIDI tracks defined in a SONAR project, each configured to send to a single instance of the TruePianos VST instrument.
You can tell from the segments that I have been building it up a few bars at a time, and then I tweak the notes in the piano-roll view, selecting a voice at a time to edit:
This draft is very mechanical sounding. That’s ok given that it is a kind of “audio score”. In the final version I intend each voice to be performed in real-time on a different instrument (probably Piano, “Hammond”, Guitar, and Chapman Stick).
The end of the fugue leads directly into Part 4 of the full composition, which is why it finishes up with that shuffle chord sequence.
[Note: Since moving web hosts, I have misplaced or lost the original color schemes that were made available here. Sorry! Instead, here are some SONAR 6.2 color schemes in .clr format.]
To celebrate completion and publishing of our latest track (Playing With The Big Boys), I am also releasing a couple of SONAR 6 color schemes that I have been using for some time:
Stickman Alternate.clr.txt
Prodigal ColorClips.clr.txt
Click on the image to see a larger view.
If you want to try the color schemes out, you should right-click on the link and select ‘Save Target as..’ or ‘Save Link as…’ and save the file on your local disk. Then rename to remove the “.txt” extension.
Then, in the SONAR 6.2 Color Options dialog, choose to import the scheme. (Remember to save the scheme with an appropriate name, because the name of the file is not retained in the options dialog.)
Here’s a little idea I started working out over the last few days:
Two takes, rhythm panned left and lead panned right. The GSP21 does the reverb, and the Line 6 POD 2.0 adds a little grit, gain, and delay to the lead.
This is a peice I came up with while studying 3 and 4 note guitar voicings.
Greener Pastures – Carvin HF2
A jazzy, fingerstyle solo guitar piece, presenting the Fat Lady in a starring role.
Greener Pastures – Classical Guitar
Here is the same peice but performed on the Godin Multiac Nylon.
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