belated release announcement
you can tell i’m a real professional by the way i market myself. about 3 weeks ago, symphonie no. 4 for electric guitar was released as the first completed thing since i have christened this studio of sorts. it starts with an electric guitar rendition of chopin’s prelude no. 4 in e minor, except i transcribed it to e flat minor.
you can listen via embedded player to the right side over there. the handsome devil in the cover art is homeboy. he’s been an assistant engineer here at cows for the last 15 months. although he mostly just adds little easter eggs to the recordings.
i don’t ramble too much about making my music because i feel like, well who really cares. but for what’s worth, the whole thing started more as a production experiment. i’ve wanted for some time to record a basic guitar harmony, something one might play “cowboy style” but record it across many guitars playing a note a each. so its very very basic 6 voice harmony. and i think the effect is very cool although takes a lot of work to produce it correctly.
as you layer the guitars you start to really really hear the frequencies that are augmented on your instrument(s), the room, and/or the details of your production chain. i would like to think that i did a decent job addressing all that in the mix stage, but there are certainly some upper mid frequencies that are a bit pitch-y.
the other issue to address is phase. because of course there’s always phase. this could theoretically be addressed in production/post-production but i decided it was much easier to record all the guitars and then address it in the mix (by processing half the guitars tracks through phase adjuster boxes). this was incredibly effective. if anyone is interested, let me know and i’ll upload before and after phase-adjusted recordings of the harmony guitars.
as for the composition itself… since this started as a production experiment, i didn’t create the most interesting harmony for a seven minute composition. and once i decided to commit myself to making this something “finished” i had already recorded all those harmony guitars and would be damned if i was going to start from scratch (i do not like cutting and pasting parts in the box. i think its a bad practice and you can hear the edits in the recording). so i had to write my melodies to the song structure i unfortunately committed myself to. which was fine at first. i’m very much happy with the first and second movements (the first 4 minutes and 40 seconds of the piece). the third and forth movements took a lot of effort to write. it was a balance between making it part of the same thing but not just repeating movements. in the end, i’m pretty happy with how the third movement turned out, but wish i at least produced the last movement a little better. although i love the sound of many fuzzed out guitars layered on top of each other, i made it impossible to get the snare drum to cut through.
oh well, you live and you learn.
thank you for following.
here’s to future sounds.
