Intermission n.2
By ViridianLoom on May 8, 2022 9:20 pm
This is a bit of a strange submission. What you're listening to here is material from 2012 that I relearned last night, recorded for the first time, and then tried to supplement with a some additional instrumentation (African drums, synths, and violins) just so it wouldn't sound completely flat. At the time I was writing music pretty "free form" so that means didn't use any metronome on this so you might hear some rhythmic mess ups.
I started the week off with a song idea that was developing nicely and I could "feel" where I wanted the song to go but not quite figure out HOW to get it there. Partially a problem with mixing clean and distorted guitars as well as coming up with drum beats that would impart the vibe I was striving for. I often cite my lack of knowledge in drums as a hindrance and it's probably due to not attentively listening to and studying what the drums are doing in songs I like often enough. I really need to just buckle down and buy an electric kit sometime so I can get into the mindset better.
Anyways, this isn't that song. I've had a pretty busy week with family and I couldn't give that track the attention it really needed, so I began trying to come up with a back up song idea. What I ended up doing was digging around in some old guitar pro files from way back in the day when I was just recording my ideas onto a handheld digital recorder and transcribing/composing them in guitar pro. So I found a file titled "Andy Mckee Tuning" and started playing that stuff for fun and nostalgia. I'm honestly a little surprised at how challenging it was to play on guitar, I can only assume I didn't know how to play this stuff cleanly and was writing it into guitar pro as a proof of concept or something?
I'd hesitate to even call this a song. All these ideas were within the same guitar pro file but kind of represent where I was back in 2012, so I like to think of it as a collage of memories tied to music. A friend of mine was learning some Andy Mckee tunes on his guitar and I took an interest in trying it out too, but he was way better at it than I was haha. Had some good times hanging out on the porch of his house in the middle of the night just jamming on our acoustic guitars. Some of the slower, moodier parts are probably when I was feeling lonely after a break up. Cliche, but yeah, I was 22 and figuring shit out in life lol. And I recall a majority of this stuff being written in the middle of the night when I was working late night shifts and was often up until 4am, noodling ideas on the guitar in my parent's garage so I wouldn't wake them up. That's another memory I'm quite fond of actually. I recently sat with my girlfriend in our garage, playing guitar while she was painting, and thought about how much I missed sitting in a space devoid of distractions that was quiet. It always put me in this contemplative mindset of either composing, improvising, or reflecting in silence.
Not sure if this will be enjoyable to anyone but I figured if I was going to find a lazy way to submit something this week I might as well try to do so in a meaningful way.
And for the curious, the tuning is E-C-D-G-A-D with a capo on the 3rd fret. That C in particular is scary to tune up especially when I prefer to use medium gauge strings :S lol
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
