New music uploads...

I finally decided tonight to go ahead and upload the tracks I recently finished mastering to my sound cloud page.  Wanted to give you all a chance to listen to what I've been working so hard on.  This is, of course, only the beginning.  I've composed about 12 new tunes since August as well, all of them in various stages of completeness, and all of them which will eventually go to the licensing agency as well.  

The tracks.  

Black and Blue are songs that I wrote for Steve Pitre for the Insiders1 Promo that he produced last year.    I liked the idea of making them sister songs and the color blue came to mind almost immediately when I thought about what to name Blue.  Black followed rather obviously.  The versions I just posted contain some new material not on the versions on the promo.  Black got more keyboard parts that I almost cut completely from the track originally (just developed them a little more).  Blue got some guitar parts with a wash of delay effects that had not previously existed.  

A Million Shades of Blue I wrote back in 2010 but knew I wanted to send to the licensing agency as soon as I started thinking about which pre-existing tracks I could repurpose.  I wrote the song one day starting from a riff that I came up with while playing around with new sounds in my Native Instruments synths (FM8, Absynth and Massive) and, as often happens, I didn't come up with a name for it until a few days later.  I was walking home from a friend's party at around 5am with the song running through my head and my eyes wandered up to the sky.  It being a little under an hour until sunrise, the sky was displaying this amazing indigo color that faded to black the farther from the eastern sky you looked.  The phrase "A Million Shades of Blue" passed through my head and I knew immediately that that's what the song was supposed to be called.  I can't remember if I wrote the keyboard part for this one before or after the name arrived.  It used to be played with just the Absynth patch, that screaming sound you hear underneath the keyboard.  I added the keyboard on this remix to give the melody more definition there and dropped the Absynth down in the mix to get rid of the muddiness I was hearing.  

Song for the Awakened was written all the way back in 2004.  I've always enjoyed the groove of this song and was particularly proud of some experimentation I did with truncating the groove before it could finish the measure and restarting it but not doing it the same in all parts.  I found that the phrases in each instrument could fit together in all kinds of different ways if I just let go of all conventional time signatures.  The mix on the old version troubled me greatly and I had to get ruthless with it.  This was one of the milestones during this project that I blogged about a few weeks back.  Getting a handle on the mix and actually liking the song again was a great boost to my confidence.  All it took was realizing that I had three instruments playing what one could handle and that there were large chunks of the song that didn't need both the keyboard and the guitar part to be fighting for attention.   Can't remember where the name for this song came from.  Think I was re reading passages in Radiant Mind at the time and the thought of being "Awakened" resonated with me a lot.  

Daresay was a favorite from the 2004 batch and I think it actually got released with Windy April and Pastel on iTunes a while back but I didn't really promote that incarnation of the Automatic Head/Disrupt moniker.   Daresay was a tune that I wrote in Fruity Loops entirely but this version used some sampled harp from Kontakt and my own guitar playing to spice it up.  Plus I used Kontakt to splice my own drum line up and create a breakdown drum part that I actually liked this time (vs. the old version that I felt I could never get right).  I wrote a blog a while back on my main page about how to do this with Kontakt and have used the technique a few times now.  Currently using it with the remix contest I'm working on, in fact. 

The last one I want to talk about was another new one from 2010 called Sleepwalking With You, a track written with Fruity Loops and transferred to Logic.  Another of the batch of tracks for the licensing agency that I had trouble with and then got ruthless with.  This one, not so much with the mix but with the decision to add other instruments.  I had written piano parts and several guitar parts that all got chucked one day when I just started using distorted guitar and the trademark backwards effect that I got from the Grain Delay box in Guitar Rig 5 and used on the score for "The Life."  That eureka moment sent the song into overdrive and made it among the first that I finished.  I can't remember why I chose the title Sleepwalking With You...maybe just that it sounds dreamy, like you're half awake, and the phrase sounded funny to me when it passed through my brain.  Now that I listen back with the distorted guitar it sounds like it might be, not sleepwalking, but a night terror.  But it does sound sort of mournful and wistful like you're dreaming about someone you've lost or that is not in your life anymore.  

That's about as deep as I'm going to get about it.  For now, I hope you enjoy listening to the tracks and that you've enjoyed this little insight into my compositional process.  Take care!