2004 is going to be a big year! 3 tunes finished within the first couple of weeks - and these aren't easy or simple works, they all have something new or different about them - and another 2 ready for final mixing as I write this, and another 9 or ten underway to various extents. At least in this early part of the year, I have the distinct feeling of starting more tunes than I have time to finish - and when that happens, I tend to end up with a year like 2001, which ran to 7 pages! What's more, some of these are amongst my best works to date...... The year started with a bang, in the form of an invitation to permit some of my tunes to be used as music for a video game - more on that subject when there's something more to say - and has been flat out ever since....... # Name (Length) Size Download Links Comments       188 In The Footsteps Of Giants (3:27) 36K Having finished my annual tune of hope and optimism a little early - posting it to the site on Christmas Eve, 2003 - I was free to start expanding my musical horizons, edging just a little beyond my compositional comfort zone. This tune has consdiderable depth as a result. This uses non-standard chord structures, especially within the piano work in the chorus, a non-traditional musical structure (intro-verse-bridge-chorus-bridge-verse-end), and more variation in the drum patterns than I usually use. The drum pattern for the entire verse structure, instead of a single bar, was hand-crafted. At the same time, to avoid getting too far beyond the techniques with which I was familiar, I used a lot of my standard tricks in instrumentation and melody. The result is a good, but not great, piece of music, which has a lot of depth. 189 Blackberry Jam (6:43) 77K This is an altogether more upbeat piece, which blends very classical instruments with synthesisers to interesting effect. Inspired by a two-note ending to another song with which I was involved in sequencing, this tune more than most was crafted as variations on themes. I did all the verses, then all the choruses, then all the bridges, and so on, and then put them where I felt they had the most interesting dynamics - no two are exactly alike. Each one was then individually mixed to emphasise - or render more subtle - the differences, sometimes both! The mood of the piece is one of just having fun (hence the laughs), and the overall impression is of a group of musicians just jamming in front of an audiance, discovering the song as they go along - hence the applause, they give a virtuoso performance! The laughs actually gave me more trouble than anything else, windows kept ignoring the patch instructions I was giving it. It took quite a while to figure out just what was going on and how to fix it! This piece actually took almost 2 months to mix and arrange - I had the basic building blocks finished as far back as December 3rd of 2003. The name derives from the very motown feeling of sections of the tune, and the "jam session" feeling of the piece. 190 The Classical Virtues (6:27) 70K This piece is a real departure from my usual style, and one of the most sophisticated pieces of music I've done to date, with a lot of great ingredients. The idea was to compose a piece in which the same chords were given different emphasis by spreading the constituant notes amongst several different copies of the same instrument, then changing the characteristics of each note individually. For example, a C-chord might consist of a C2, a G2, and a C3 note. The sound of the chord can be subtly changed by splitting these up; the C2 can be emphasised for more bass depth, the G2 for more harmony, and so on. Do this one bar at a time, for multiple bars, and you soon end up with a very subtle piece! Another way in which this tune is unusual is that there are almost no drums - in fact, the only rythm instruments are two kettle drums at the end! That means that the whole sense of rythm within the piece has to be created using bass notes with the same instruments as the main theme, which introduces still more changes and variations and possibilities. Thirdly, there is a very non-standard structure to the piece - it is very classical in that respect, consisting more of movements than of verse/chorus sections. Next on the list, I did a lot of subtle work with pitch bends in the lead violin to try and capture some of the sounds that made the Rohan Theme from The Two Towers so memorable. The result really transforms the sound of the instrument. The structure of the section featuring the lead violin sounds like it's done at a different tempo, but in reality it was simply done to a different resolution within the same 4/4 timing - 12 notes to the bar. I absolutely love this piece! 191 One Moment Of Reflection (3:56) 125K A lot of the music I've been crafting over the last month or two has had strong classical leanings, and this is no exception. This is a piece with a lot of subtlety under the surface, where you don't really notice it. I started by creating a suggestive melody in 16th notes played at quite a high tempo (240 beats per minute). This was then broken apart and each 16th note became the basis of four bars of the finished melody, and the tempo slowed to 180 bpm. The basic instrumentation was always intended to be slow strings, but each bar was carefully manipulated with fades both up and down; this was achieved by copy and paste and then shifting the note to match the "16th note guideline". A preliminary mix was done as I went, varying the volumes and shifting some notes up or down an octave so that each 4-bar "note" contained sonic variety while still playing continuously throughout the 4 bars. Piano chords and drums were then added. A bassline played on muted guitar and fingered bass was next; while a basic structure for the bass riff was common to each 4-bar section, each one was copied and pasted, the note adjusted, and was then individualised. There are very few 4-bar basslines that are identical, and where the structure was the same, I used octave shifts to distinguish them. At the same time, little submelodies and textures were inserted into the existing instruments, particularly piano and strings - no 4-bar section was to be the same as any other. Approaching the end of the tune, I added some additional melody instruments because the bass variations were beginning to sound a little predictable, and I wanted to inject some additional life into the piece at that point. Final mixing tasks included individually tweaking the fades to emphasise the overall dynamics of the piece, with its surges, crests, and lulls; and adding some extra harmony notes at various points to emphasise variations in mood. As a result, the piece contains a number of melody riffs, each capable of being used as the basis of an entire tune in their own right, that are used almost as a throwaway afterthought, and which leave you wanting more of them. 192 Lazy Days In The Sun (16:24) 165K Let me start the documenting of this tune with a warning: Don't start it if you have anyplace to go in a hurry! At almost 500 bars in length and lasting for over 16 minutes, this is a genuinely epic listening experience! This started out as a blend of four experiments: (1) continuous change in chorus depth in a sustained note; (2) a melody consisting of open notes blending with sustained notes that persist throughout the melody without change; (3) Shifting some sustained notes in a chord from one instrument patch to another without shifting all of them, to create a subtexture; and (4) playing with a new pitch bend technique that IMPLIES a greater pitch change than actually takes place and always delivers the right note at the end of the bend! It was a difficult piece in that a single "line" of the tune would be 2, 4, 8, 10, or 11 bars long, depending on which line and which instrument was playing! A lot of the lines "bleed" into the next set - for example, if the main rythm etc is 10 bars long, and then goes into another 10-bar section, the strings would often be 11 bars long, with the end of the previous section overlapping into the start of the next 10-bar section. Another experiment that ended up in this piece was the use of acute changes in channel volume to erase the attack of a new note, in effect defining a new instrumental patch by changing the way the existing patch played. Anyone taking a close look at the construction of the piece will discover an abundance of such changes taking place in channel 7, the drawbar organ. It took a long time to get the effect right, but once I had one perfect bar I was able to copy-&-paste and simply change the pitch of the note played, retaining the volume effects. A further complication with this piece was that when it came time to do the final mix, I had only one channel left for doubling of instruments and stereo seperations; at the same time, there needed to be a wealth of these, as the tune felt very mono in sound. As a result, the instrument being doubled changes quite often. Sometimes this works well, at other times it's a little jarring. I also had to steal "rests" from the other patches - if there were 16 bars where the cello wasn't playing, I could use that channel, with appropriate patch changes, to double synth strings, or whatever. I just had to be careful to reset everything when I needed the cello again! Despite all the complications and complexities, at it's heart this is a fairly simple and relaxed piece. The length was more by accident than intent - early on (when it was only about 5 minutes long) I came up with an ending that I really liked, but that didn't quite connect with the rest of the tune. Ultimately, I would add another ten minutes to the tune trying to build my way toward the ending that I wanted to use! Nevertheless, it's appropriate for a tune about days that can just be spent being lazy and relaxed and carefree to BE very long; because ultimately, time ceases to matter in the tune, the melody (and it's variations) just keep happening. As a result, the tune captures some of the feeling of those days where time doesn't matter. While not 100% satisfactory, this tune comes very close, and has some really nice elements to it. I hope that those of you stuck in the icy wastes of the northern hemisphere winter enjoy this little piece of sunshine from the other side of the world!