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Sunday, 4 January 2004
Finishing II ::
Since returning from NY for Christmas a week ago, I’ve been totally engrossed in the piece I was working on before I left. I repeated more bits. The original 5 minute improvisation is there in its entirety, but it is now a 9 minute piece. It’s definitely the most composed thing I’ve done in a long time, which isn’t surprising considering how the pieces that emerged from my walk down memory lane are mostly quite composed. There is one section in the original track where I played fast patterns with one hand while going nuts with the filters and retuning the oscillators, and I somehow fit a cool synth solo on top of it perfectly. I guess it comes from having listened to it so much that I knew exactly what I was playing over.
I spent a couple of days on the tricky business of the ending. I got everything lined up so that all the themes converged in just the right ways while making sense with the original track, which, aside from fixing up a few timing glitches, and of course, repeating chunks of it, I’ve treated as cast in stone. But of course, after stepping back and hearing it in context, the ending too flew by way too quickly. It took lots of trial and error to figure out exactly how much repetition worked. Finally, finished! I told a friend last night, I’m ready to mix!
Listening today, it became clear, no, I’m done composing. Now I have to go replay all the parts that I fixed up with quantization (which is the worst of both worlds when the tempo is changing every measure) and are too obviously copied-and-pasted (identical phrasing and lack of variation). More to do before it’s finished.
I worked a little on another piece to distract myself. This one doesn’t know whether it wants to be an ambient journey or a really heavy groove with odd phrase lengths. It seems to be answering, “yes.” I want to send a mix to a couple of guitarist friends and see what they make of it.
References:
Surprising myself ( 8 April 2004)
| << Finishing I | 2004 > January | Absynth makes the part grow longer >> |