Trip to the Harrowing Woods

The original working title of this song, as you can see on the VLC window in my screen capture, was Guitar Symphony. I wanted to see what would happen if I layered a bunch of identical guitar parts and panned them around, and this is the tune that I came up with.

Trip to the Harrowing Woods was written from the top down, taking my last song's method one step further. Last time, I wrote the rhythm guitar parts first so that the drums could support the song better, but because there were no drums in this song I instead wrote the melody first and chose chords, backgrounds, and countermelodies that supported the melody I already had. The song still sounds like something I wrote, but I can hear the flipped perspective.

The form is kind of an AAB thing, with an intro, a repeat, and an outro to match the intro. Between the last B section and the outro, however, is a section I'm not sure how to name. It's not a development, it's not a bridge, and it's not a breakdown, but it has some elements of all of those. Or perhaps the entire tune is one big AB form? However you want to analyze it, I suppose.

I drew from several different inspirations for this composition. Before I even started writing, I had decided that I wanted to work in E Dorian. The intro and outro evoke some of the classical guitar playing I did a few years ago, and the guitar arrangement reminds me of playing in guitar ensembles. And towards the end, when I play a 4:5 polyrhythm in the acoustics, I'm thinking about minimalist pieces I've come to enjoy.

This is my first music video in a while to not include an improvised guitar solo, but I thought it didn't really fit the mood. I've used guitar solos for a while to make longer instrumentals more interesting and avoid repetition. In this piece, the expansiveness of the arrangement gives me more opportunities for contrast. Even then, I probably could have done more.

So, did I get the results I wanted from all the doubling? Sorta. The melody was doubled four times, the chords were doubled five times, and the countermelody was doubled six times. I think I ended up with four or five harmony tracks. Apparently, however, it wasn't enough to get the big sound that I wanted. I guess if I want the sound of a hundred instruments in an orchestra, I'm going to probably have to play a hundred layers. It's safe to say that this will not be my last experiment with pushing the limits of my DAW's ability to manage tracks.

Electric guitars were split 50/50 between my Telecaster Deluxe and my Les Paul, and I pulled out the Hohner steel string along with the Squier J Bass. Actually, the jazz bass was the only non-improvised part that didn't get doubled. I had enough bass already.

The song title comes from the video I recorded to go along with the music. In the video, you're seeing me play Harrowing Woods on Disc Golf Valley, and getting my record best score on that course. 

All The Things You Are

 

Almost four years ago, I recorded All The Things You Are as a five-part Alto Saxophone harmonization of the melody. I've loved this jazz standard for a long time, and it felt like about time that I record it on guitar. As usual, I did a few things in this recording that are unusual for me. First, I used a microphone instead of capturing the direct output of either my guitar or my amplifier. I wanted to see what the amp sounded like with a mic in front of it, and I'm pretty happy with the results. Also, I didn't use a click track for this recording. I thought of it as a test of my musicianship, and I'm mostly happy with how this track turned out. It's not perfect, but it's very human.

Act Casual

 I put this together in a rush because I wanted to see if I could still do a decent split-screen edit. The answer was no, I needed to do a little better job of preparing if I wanted to get good results, but the song was really good so I posted it anyways.

This isn't a very complicated song, because I knew I only had a couple of hours to finish it. It's a modal groove in F Mixolydian, and I put some synths on a melody. This one ain't rocket science as far as composition goes. 

The most interesting part of this little jam is the production. I recorded both the bass and the guitar DI, which gave me flexibility to mess with tones afterwards. For both of them, I threw on some compression, an amp sim, reverb, and some simple EQ. On the guitar solo, however, I got a little bit more involved. I tried out the Guitarix distortion plugin, which fit the vibe of the tune pretty well after some extreme EQing to tone down the fizziness. A bit of delay for atmosphere rounded out the solo tone.

Everything you're hearing that isn't on screen was done in LMMS and Reaper. To start, I put together the basic drum patterns in LMMS. On top of that, I layered the chord progression and wrote the melody. All of the synths are stock TripleOscilator patches except for one of the melody doubles, which is ZynAddSubFX. After I had the form laid out, I exported the tracks and brought them into Reaper, where I edited the drum parts to add fills and spice up the pattern from time to time. That's really all there is to it.

Ready. Set. Stay.

 

In this tune, I expanded on a few ideas I explored in previous songs, but with a rock band setup instead of a guitar solo over synths. I'm pretty happy with the way the drums support the ensemble, which has been a big compositional goal of mine lately. I've also lately enjoying playing my extended guitar solos in a different key or tonality than the main melodic material. 

The A section is based around a riff over the chord progression to Herbie Hancock's "Chameleon", which is essentially a two chord shuttle in Bb Dorian. I took some chances with the intervals I chose to highlight, and I'm still making up my mind whether I like the dissonance in some places. The B section has the same chords, but with a different harmonic rhythm.

My method this time around was to play all of the rhythm guitar parts with a 16th note hi hat pattern and a kick drum, add bass, and then write the real drum part to the guitars. Normally I write the drums first because it's way easier to play rhythmically solid guitar parts with a drum groove than without, which is why I made sure to have a hi-hat pattern going to keep me locked in to the feel I wanted. That way, when I went and wrote the drum parts, it all matched up and the programmed drums didn't feel oddly strict like they sometimes do.

The bridge modulates from Bb Dorian to Ab major, which changes the feeling of the song drastically without straying very far from the home key. By this point in the song, you've only heard two chords, both of which are fairly dissonant. When the Ab6 chord hits, it's clearly a modulation even though it's still "in the key" from a more simplistic point of view. The change is dramatic, while also feeling inevitable in a way. I bet I'll use this kind of modulation again in a future song. I suppose it's not too unlike how Avril Lavigne's song "Smile" tonicizes the four chord in the chorus, and even though the song never really leaves the key of A major, the four is clearly treated as the root for a while. That's something for me to play around with more later.

The rhythm parts were recorded on my Epiphone Les Paul, and the lead part was recorded in (mostly) one take on my Fender Telecaster Deluxe. 

I didn't realize until I started improvising, but this tune is in the same key and at the same tempo as Onyx, which I wrote a few weeks before. Of course, the feel is completely different, but I still threw in a quote of the melody in my solo, to acknowledge the similarity. I mean, they're even both based on a sixteenth note hi-hat pattern and a riff that walks up the scale. Seems like I can give up on writing music, because I have no original ideas left...

...new song coming out same time next week!

Seven-part Rondo in E♭

This was a fun one. The form is ABACABA, or a seven-part rondo, but of course I've taken a few liberties with this centuries-old form.

In the A section, the guitar takes the lead, while the synths play a syncopated chord progression. In keeping with the classical vibe, the harmony is a circle progression that sometimes skips the tonic to keep the momentum moving forward. The drums generally follow the rhythm of the synth part.

For the B section, the roles reverse and the melody is in the synths, and the guitar plays a hybrid chordal/countermelody part. Here the harmony is much simpler, so the bass is more free to be independent. Tonally, the B section modulates to the mediant, which is atypical for a classical rondo in a major key, but I've always thought that modulating to the dominant sounds a little cheesy for my taste.

The C section is the guitar solo, and for this part I've condensed the harmonic relationship between the A and B sections into a four chord loop and put it in a new pair of keys- B minor and G major. You could think of G major as the parallel major of the B section key, but my intention was to evoke the major III chord in the key of E-flat. Putting the B minor chord first in the loop weakens this interpretation, but in either case I like the way the modulation sounded. 

After the solo, I tried to mellow things out a bit by taking the drums out occasionally in the A sections- the B section remains unchanged. I chose not to try to transpose the B section back into the tonic key because (if you haven't already noticed) modulations are important to my songwriting process and I didn't want to ruin the emotional impact of the B section. And besides, it's in a very closely related key anyways.

And finally, the gear I used to make this happen:

1. My 2008 Epiphone Les Paul Standard into a Boss Katana 50mk2 with an Electro-harmonix Metal Muff and the built-in phaser and spring reverb on the Katana. I used the neck pickup the whole time.
2. A Squier Affinity Jazz bass from 2009, both pickups on full. Recorded DI, but with a 50/50 blend of one of Reaper's built in amp simulators and a ton of compression.
3. Organic, an additive synth plugin that comes with LMMS. I just hit the "randomize" button until I found something I liked, slapped an envelope on it, and called it a day.
4. LB302, another LMMS plugin. Set to sine wave and with the distortion turned up. Originally I was intending for this to be the only bass on the track, but it sounded pretty weak so I decided to grab the real bass and mix this one in for color. You can still hear it pretty clearly in the last two A sections where the drums and bass guitar cut out, leaving just the synths and this synth bass.
5. The synth melody in the B section was a combination of Triple Oscillator and ZynAddSubFX.
6. MuseScore's default piano sound reinforced all of the synth parts for just a little more fullness. It can be heard clearest in the B section melody.
7. The drum samples came from my old high school drumkit. I still thank past me every time I use them.
8. There's a hi-hat sound through an auto filter that comes from LMMS, along with a few extra percussion samples.
9. All the mixing was done in Reaper, along with exactly two edits in the bass part to correct wrong notes (can you spot them?).
10. OBS captured my screen, my phone recorded the videos of me playing, and Kdenlive put it all together. 

Goodbye 2021

Can you tell I just got a volume pedal and needed an excuse to use it?

The most exciting music theory part of this tune is the phrase structure. I'd been wanting to write a song with three-bar phrases for a while, and this is the song that resulted. Originally, the plan was just to have three bars of ambiance at the beginning of the tune so that the actual start would be surprising. However, as I wrote the tune, I decided to make the main riff three bars long as well.

In hindsight, I'm not happy with the mix on this track. I think I cut too much low end out, and if I ever revisit this track I bet I'll overcompensate and drown it in bass. Dear future me: please don't do that.

All in all, my favorite part of this tune is the verse riff and melody.

The guitars used in this track:

1. Rhythm guitars were my Fender Telecaster Deluxe and Epiphone Les Paul Standard, both on the bridge pickup.
2. Lead guitar was played my Fender Telecaster Deluxe.
3. Squier Affinity Jazz Bass, as always.

Alilgnment

This track was mostly done in LMMS, which has been my fix for electronic music sounds ever since I started making music. Something new that I've started enjoying, though, are the ZynAddSubFX presets. I'm not super interested in making my own patches, so it's awesome to have so many useful sounds ready to plug in and play, so-to-speak. In Alignment, the Rhodes Space2 preset features as the main arpeggio and chordal sound, while my own BitInvader patch holds down the low end.

I think with this track I have officially done quartal harmony to death. It's my go-to for a static, almost-minor sound for a reason, but I tend to gravitate to the same patterns every time I go quartal. I'll give myself a pass because I like this tune, but next time I'm likely to go quintal or modal. I liked the pairing of the quartal harmony with a whole tone scale bassline, despite the fact that there are no perfect fourths in the whole tone scale. In that way, you could see the bassline from this track as a continuation of the ideas in my Whole Tone Power Chords video from way back.

Drum sounds come courtesy of my high school drumset samples, and a couple LMMS built in samples as well. The guitar swells and solo were done on my Fender Telecaster Deluxe.

Insistence

Insistence is another track that seeks to unite my electronic and instrumental music processes into one sound. For years, I used to think of my electronic music as a fun side project that didn't have much to do with my guitar playing. Sure, there was some overlap, but I had very much separated the two musical approaches. That started to change in my Music Technology class, where some of the assignments forced me to combine MIDI and audio tracks in one project. Since then, my electronic production and guitar playing have converged, and this track is a good example.

Another idea that I thought about as I worked on this track was the role of the drumset in my music. It's extremely easy to program up a cool sounding drum beat with generic fills, play some guitar over it, and stop there. Of course, rock beats have their place. I'm a guitar player, there's no way I'm going to ever give up my beloved rock-n-roll backbeat. However, the drumset can do more. Writing the drums with the other parts in mind opens up a new world of possibilities. When the guitar solo comes in, though, it's all rock-n-roll.

I started this track off in LMMS to write the synths parts, so that I could then export the MIDI into MuseScore to write the drum parts. Nearly all of the synth parts were doubled on guitar, and on this track I mostly used my Epiphone Les Paul standard. I also used the default MuseScore piano sound to fill out the track. As I work on creating a cohesive blend of multiple styles of music, I've found that doubling parts between live instruments, programmed synths, and even a touch of generic MIDI piano all blend to create that sound I wanted. It's not a synth backing track with a genre-blind guitar solo on top anymore. It's a track written from the ground up with all of the physical musical instruments and electronic plugins contributing their strengths in service of a whole. These principles have guided my experimentation over this past year, and I think it's been the most exciting part of making music for me lately.

To summarize:

1. The synths were programmed first in LMMS, including melodies, harmonies, and a bassline.
2. Drums were written in MuseScore with the MIDI output from LMMS as a reference, so that the drum part could compliment the synth parts as best as possible.
3. At the same time, the MIDI piano from MuseScore was exported so I could mix it in for color.
4. The synth parts were doubled on guitar, with a few lead parts added as my ear guided me. 
5. Guitar solo out, because improvisation is another great way to make music come alive.

Onyx

This tune turns my usual method on its head a little bit. Okay, the guitar lead and rock feel aren't at all unusual for me, but the rest of the production was different compared to what I'd been doing lately.

First up, the drums were done in LMMS. It's the easiest way for me to experiment with different samples and have better control over dynamics, but fills are less convenient and it's a total pain in the rear to depart from the 16th note grid. That limitation didn't really hold me back here, as I was really just interested in putting together some loops quickly so I could play guitar.

I lifted the bassline from the A section of I Got Rhythm. It has just the right amount of swagger for this tune, while being tonally ambiguous enough to work in minor without alterations. I used my normal bass signal chain, which is Reaper's built in amp simulator and a ton of compression.

The synth was a last-minute addition that wound up, in my mind, stealing the show a little bit. It's a simple patch I threw together in ReaSynth, but it gets the job done and provides a break from the onslaught of guitar shredding. 

Aside from that, there's not much to it. Just a lot of notes, a wah pedal, and way too much distortion (which is the correct amount, of course). I got to bust out the automation feature I never use in Reaper in order to do the sweep panning of the tapping part, but other than that it was a fairly normal production for me. Onyx will probably go down as my grooviest tune of the year.

NaNoWriMo 2021: In Review

 

Another NaNoWriMo has come and gone, and this time I joined in on the fun. I last attempted NaNoWriMo in 2016, when I stopped writing after eight days and only thirteen thousand words. Five years later, I've notched my second all-time NaNoWriMo win with Outside the Perimeter, a science fiction story that tackles themes of isolation and constant threats from without and within. I'm not going to talk much about the book itself, though, for reasons that should be clear quickly. I will, however, share my process and my experience.

I wrote Outside the Perimeter with one guiding principle: I didn't care if what I wrote was trash, because the novel isn't the goal. Writing fifty thousands words is the goal. I'm never going to edit, and nobody else is going to read this story. I finished NaNoWriMo, and that's the end of the road for my novel. Maybe next November, I'll write a sequel, but for now, it's over.

Being free of the need to be perfect or even good was key to my success this year. A lot of the NaNoWriMo advice I found in preparation for this month focused on how to write good novels, and I did hear a lot of good advice. However, that wasn't what I was aiming for this year. I did no planning, made no attempt at a character arc (although one snuck in anyways), and thought very little about continuity or smooth transitions. This book is a collection of scenes I wanted to write, in the order I wanted to write them. But of course, the goal wasn't to have a book people want to read, but to write fifty thousand words in a month. I wanted to enjoy writing, secure in the knowledge that it didn't matter whether people would enjoy reading it or not. This isn't a mindset for successful authors, because that's not my goal. I want writing to be a hobby that's fun for me to do, so I'm only doing the things that I find fun. Maybe one day I'll put effort into writing something good again, but until that day comes, there's no harm in churning out fifty thousand words of garbage.

My focus this year was on writing as a process, and winning. Mostly winning, actually. I wanted to produce words in bulk, whether they were good or not, and I met my goal. I actually finished a whole week early, which is great because I can focus on my final exams coming soon.

Every day, I wrote as many words as I could, so that I could take a day off occasionally without feeling guilty. I missed a few days, and wrote significantly less than my daily goal on a few occasions. But when the words were flowing, which was often, I managed to get far enough ahead that I could take breaks.

Unlike in the past, where I would try to get all of my writing for the day done in one session, I tried to take frequent breaks this year. Usually I would only write for an hour at a time, with the goal of a thousand words. Then I'd go do something else, and come back later for another hour. I'd only continue after that if I felt like I had something to say. My last day of writing, November 24th, was my biggest day: 5,045 words. My lowest non-zero day was 1,000 exactly, on the 18th.

My word count, as of 11/25/21.

As my graph shows, I started out by aiming for 1,667 words every day, just as recommended. However, I missed a day early on because I had a concert that night, and I was quickly playing catch up. That's when I came up with my method of 2,000 words per day, in two sessions of an hour each. This worked well for me, so I kept it up until the 13th, when I took another day off to focus on spending time with my girlfriend. After that weekend, my writing became much more sporadic, but because I stayed ahead of schedule, I was able to keep progress going by focusing on staying above the grey line.

In the final stretch, I took advantage of Thanksgiving break to write as much as I could. Because I didn't have to pace myself anymore, it was easy to push through to the end. And when I hit 50k, I saved my work, closed the document, and enjoyed the moment. I finished my story, and there was nothing left to do.

Although this was my first NaNo since 2016, I have participated in Camp NaNoWriMo three times since then, with just shy of 400 words to show for it. I may attempt another Camp NaNo this summer, perhaps with a smaller goal or a longer writing period. I enjoyed the process, and that's what I want to take with me into the future. I'm happy to be finished, so I can take a break, but I'm most happy about the weeks where I was able to write 2k every day, completely sustainably. Now the question is whether I can keep that habit going into the future. 

Infix

For the past few years, Piano Phase has been my favorite music to fall asleep to. It's also been the piece that I play for myself to help calm down my mind when I need to. It's amazing to me how much complexity can come from such a simple process and a single phrase of music.

So of course, I had to write a piece with a similar vibe while also using a completely different process that's more well suited to my style. Even so, I had to bust out quite a few new production tricks to get Infix sounding the way it does. This piece is a prototype; it's the result of me dipping my toes into the water of minimalism and ambient music without really committing to the process. I wanted to know if this is a style of music I could put more work into, and I think I can.

For Infix, I created a few different phrases roughly in the key of C, with varying speeds and lengths. I showed particular preference to odd numbered groupings, to make sure nothing would quite line up perfectly. Occasionally I threw in a drone, usually playing a not other than the root to provide a little bit of a different color. The point isn't to bombard the listener with C major the whole time, but rather to explore the ways different notes behave together without functional harmony there to set the rules.

Infix was written in LMMS using a lot of automation tracks.

Two For Two (ft. Erika)

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