Upon Blackest Rose Doth My Love Weepe
By Paisleyfrog on April 26, 2026 9:44 pm
Let's do some Renaissance Black Metal. Or at least those genres as interpreted by a frog.
Finally started to feel good this week! Let's make something weird.
I've had the silly idea of making renaissance metal for a LONG time. And if I did it, I always thought I'd call the band SpeedWhistle. Took me like 20 years, but I finally got it done. Let’s do it!
On the whole, I didn't spend a lot of time on music this week. I'm still recovering from my cold, and it felt good to spend some time just resting, I was pretty confident I could just make something on Saturday.
I don't do a lot of social media anymore, but I do watch Instagram Reels. I don't interact with anything, but it has me pegged enough to know that I like music. It's been showing me a lot of ads for various plugins, and it caught me last week - a black metal amp sim for Amp Locker. I don't listen to a ton of black metal, but I absolutely love Immortal...so I bought it. And the main riff for this rack jumped out right after installing.
Fast forward to like Saturday morning. I played around with a bunch of ideas, and nothing really stuck. As is the way, I ended up going back to the very first thing I did this week, that riff I did after I downloaded the Krieg black metal amp. I'm really wondering when I'm going to start trusting my first ideas....
I had the riff, but nothing else. Sunday morning! Decided that it needed to start quiet. Added a few sounds like harp and English horn. I don't own a crumhorn, but I've found that English horn is a decent approximation. Harp is from Hollywood Strings.
Did the initial whistle take with a Bb whistle...but very quickly realized that recorder was the way to go. Did something I've been wanting to do since forever and did a four+ part recorder arrangement - tenor, soprano and sopranino. I'm rather pleased with it. Everything was recorded with an SM58 just sort of sitting on my desk.
The lead guitar sound isn't actually a guitar - it's an electric mandolin (and looks like a Stratocaster that accidentally got put into the dryer). I've been wanting to do tracks with more of the weird instruments I own, so a lot of that was accomplished this week 
Finally did more of a drum treatment - this is a session drummer, but I converted to MIDI and broke the line into separate tracks...so I was able to approach each instrument as it needed (snare, kick and overhead). Pretty pleased with the drums, especially for a quick job!
Title is a play on John Dowland, who was the first rockstar of music in about 1590 or so. His songs and lute arrangements are phenomenal. If you haven't listened before, go check them out. If Dowland were alive today, he 100% would be emo or black metal.
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and then the guitars kicked in! \m/ An epic recorder symphony! 