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A Weekend of Music
After knocking out all the usual weekend tasks (taking care of the cats, working out, checking my investments, writing this blog), I’ve got a behemoth-sized task to undertake in that I have two songs that I have to finish today for two different projects (one for a compilation, one for this site) and I’m going to spend all day tomorrow putting together a 20+ minute track for the Album-a-Day project.
Music has more or less been inundating my life lately, as I finished putting Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Four together on Wednesday morning and have had to remaster the song I finished last weekend for yet another compilation due to the mix being a little hot, which was a problem I noticed with one of my NSD4 tracks. The NSD4 track was remixed after I finished the compilation track, so I was changing hats quickly throughout the week (from composer to producer) and it was hard to keep everything straight.
Now that last week’s work is hopefully behind me, I can focus on the songs I need to finish today. I’ve made significant progress on the song for the compilation, which is a remix of a song I already did for the compilation before the project manager had his laptop stolen. I’m using most of the same elements (same key, tempo, and samples), but I’ve changed the name and completely revamped the drum loops. I should be able to finish things up in a fairly short period of time if I don’t do too much live recording.
The monthly song for the site had some major breakthroughs yesterday morning, and I’ve got the basics figured out for the structure, which is basically when things start coming together for me in concern to a composition. The main drum loop is 23 bars, which gave me the idea to build it off the pattern of the rhythm guitar riff in the Meshuggah track, “New Millennium Cyanide Christ” (one of my favorites of theirs), which is broken up into five chunks of a 23/16 time signature and one chunk of a 13/16 time signature. It adds up to a 128/16 time signature, which is basically a fancier way of saying 4/4, the most common time signature. Time signature.
Anyway, after a four measure intro, there’ll be the 128 measures of the song and I’ll have things going in and out at various intervals. There’s a part that starts on the 9th measure of the 128 which changes every six measures and the drums are either in one or two-measure loops, so this is going to be a bit of a challenge to fully understand all the nuances with everything that’s going on. That said, I haven’t done a song with lots of varying time signatures for quite some time, so it should be fun to embark on that path again. I still need to figure out a name for it, but I’ll likely crib something from the “New Millennium Cyanide Christ” lyrics (hello “Into the New Eternity”).
Finally, tomorrow will be Halloween and I’ll be celebrating with lots of horror movies and creating a giant creepy ambient tune. The rules for Album-a-Day state that you’re not supposed to come up with any ideas before the day you start and finish it, but I’m the type to excessively conceptualize and had to plot out a few basics. I haven’t written any notes for it (or even really picked a key), but I’ve got a few loose structure ideas. As the only tunes I’ve done that have gone over 20 minutes (the two on Dark Side of Zebes) are ambient in nature, that seems like the correct tack to take.
I picked my tempo as 66.6 BPM (because it's Halloween and 666 BPM would be ridiculous) and did the calculations concerning the length, so it will require 333 measures to make the 20 minute mark. I’m going to bump it up to 384, so I’ll have six parts of 64 measures and it should make it to just north of 23 minutes. I’m thinking of having it build for the first five parts and having a giant reverse reverb washout for the last part, but I won’t really know until I get to working on the song.
Even if I do get disqualified for over-thinking things, it’ll still be a nice challenge and an interesting experience. If it comes off swimmingly, I could try doing more long ambient tracks (though maybe not quite as long) in the same manner by time blocking a whole day to put one together. I could make it a once-a-month thing or something along those lines, but I’m not going to start doing that until 2011.
In any event, I’ve spent too much time on other things this morning and I need to get to work!
Discuss this post at the For the Love of Creativity Forum!
Posted on October 30th, 2010.
External Links
• Album-a-Day – Crap Art: Album-A-Day
• Dark Side of Zebes – Amaranthine Skies – Dark Side of Zebes – CCN002 – Concatenation Records
• Meshuggah – M E S H U G G A H – T h e . O f f i c i a l . W e b s i t e
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