The inspiration for this project was to place some restraints on composition 4 tracks, 4 instruments from a related musical family, 4 minutes long. I wanted to encourage music with perhaps a stronger emphasis on melody and harmony than on the textural approach of some CT projects.
The copyright to each song belongs to the respective artist.
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Each part recorded onto one track of my Boss microBR recorder using the inbuilt microphone. 4 parts downloaded into 'Reaper' DAW, where editing was carried out, including correction of some timing mistakes, and creatively changing the timing of certain parts. Some simple effects were applied across the master buss (noise reduction, touch of EQ to remove some midrange, a hint of reverb and the meerest sniff of compression).
I found this project really liberating, it was actually great having to be restricted to 4 parts, and not having to succumb to the usual temptations of adding 'just a little bit more tambourine in section b of the chorus' syndrome.
The Grímnismál, a Norse mythological poem from the 13th-century Codex Regius manuscript, describes the four red deer (Dain, Dvalin, Duneyr and Durathror) that nibble at the branches of the Tree of Life, Yggdrasil. The Scandinavian archaeologist Finnur Magnussen interpreted these harts to be representative of the North, South, East and West winds; here the deer are assigned to flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon, a wind quartet manifested mellotronically using a double harmonic Byzantine/Charhargah mode that is also believed to have been used in ancient Icelandic music.
I had a piece half-way complete, but abandoned it and started again. I found an old midi snippet from an exercise in whole tones from many years ago and decided to do the whole piece through midi. I did a crash course in Ableton midi and put the notes and arrangement together fairly rapdily. What took ages was choosing the sound to be used! In the end, I settled on one called "piano for airports"! Don't ask me how the melody and timing came about, I just moved notes around until it sounded right.
dco - guitars (electric, semi-acoustic and electrocoustic) variously strummed, plucked, picked, e-bowed and Jellyfished). Constructed in Acid Pro 6; edited and recombinated in AudioStudio 8.
The piece was inspired by last year's 125th anniversary celebrations of the august academic organisation which permits me gainful employment in one of it's libraries. 125 is used for notation and tempo. Also notes derived from the letters of the geographic location - C A D E F - inform other tonal information. Chord structures were derived from these notes and numbers, hence a melodic structure CDG DEA GAD, a 7/4 pattern CA/D/FF (transposed a 5th at one point for reasons of lax information management but retained for musicality), and amongst others, a chord sequence incorporating minor and major relative tones:
C Dm G - Am F Em - D Em A - Bm G F#m - G Am D - Em C Bm
And a finale in 9/8 based once more on the upward spiral of CDG DEA GAD speeded-up with a touch of time compression to achieve the 4 minute time frame.
Thanks Michael. It's four different sets of grand piano samples played by midi keyboard and quantised (I'm no pianist). 1st half is composed, 2nd half improvised.
A little more info about this track. Bass and 3 guitars. Guitars were tracked through a VG88 into several delays. Bass is DI through a TubeMP into a DL4 & DD20. All recorded into Sonar. I started the project with very written out structured parts, but as I got into recording, I liked the little motif and played it off of the delayed parts.
I like very much; kind of aerial cristal tune. Though some false notes and unwanted noises (in my opinion) should have been removed, and the bass less trebly sounding.
A quartet for four sets of high bells. It is based on the pitch class [0,1,3] and its inversion [0,2,3]. Though the piece starts in the middle of a strict canon, it quickly breaks down in terms of complexity and tempo.
it's a kind of jazz quartet with guitar (nylon acoustic), piano, drums & double bass. of course all of them virtual instruments. another frankenstein baby totally improvised, with each part played without listening to the other backing tracks and then pasted on top, with tiny edits (ending). for the input i used a 25 keys midi keyboard as sole instrument. first takes only! ..
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