These pieces are from my various rock, techno, and soundtrack projects that use guitars, basses, drums, and conventional pop songwriting. I’ve also included my arrangements of pop songs in this category.
Last week, the internet, or at least the internet if a lot of your friends are musicians and historians, blew up with the transcription of music written on a man’s butt in the depiction of hell in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. The hymn reminded me a lot of the stuff I heard in early music history, very simple, kind of plodding, and close to modern harmony with just a few odd cadences. It was definitely a decent minor key melody though, so I decided that given the melody’s history, I’d adapt it as an orchestral metal tune.
The melody was only available as an audio file, so I first had to transcribe the transcription. The only difficult part about this was that I wouldn’t exactly call the phrasing natural, or at least not as I’d like it, so I did slightly change some of the rhythmic values. I then determined what chord structure to put underneath the melody and started writing parts. The bass part, a bit more active than in traditional metal, came first. Rhythm guitars came next and focused on galloping rhythms, palm muting, and opened chords in the 2nd half of the progression. I was able to do all this between midnight and 2 last Friday, after I returned home after a party.
Saturday morning I recorded those and programmed the drums in FL Studio, then set to work on writing out the strings and brass. After rendering the orchestral elements with EWQL Symphonic Gold, I mixed what I had so far together. Then it was time for the leads.
I first wrote two additional lead guitars providing some counter-melodies and arpeggios towards the end of the song. You can hear those split hard left and right. The final piece was recording the hymn as the lead guitar part with a good dose of pinch harmonics and vibrato.
A few rounds of mixing, some quick intro and outro slides for the video, and it went up on YouTube. What a way to spend a weekend.
Pay the Devil made an appearance on MSOE‘s radio station, WMSE, on Friday morning to promote this last week’s show with Of the North. I had already taken the day off of work to get some Christmas shopping and other errands done, so it was great to throw in an extra trip to be on the air. We did some interviews, played 3 songs, talked about the show, and then at the end an Of the North original was played on the air.
All (well, most) of the Else demos I’ve worked on over the last few years have been officially released via Bandcamp. I’ve spent countless hours writing, revising, and recording this material at a pace of about a song a month. All guitars/bass/FX are performed by myself and recorded at home using my Line6 POD X3 Live.
Else is about to embark on a pretty significant home recording project, aiming to record 8 originals in the best quality that we can. We decided to do all of the recording ourselves, an increasingly popular option given the relative afford-ability of modern recording equipment. The decision was not made without first weighing some pros and cons, detailed below. Read the rest of this entry »
First of all, some exciting news… I’m engaged! We’re currently in full wedding-planning mode with the date set at March 29th. Part of the ceremony is going to involve the Echelon String Quartet, including two new arrangements. In the spirit of getting things DONE, I completed both in a stupidly busy week.
Now that I’ve played about 20 shows this year and have attended at least a dozen others, I’m really noticing some strong trends, both positive and negative. I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a pessimist, so I’m going to focus on a lot of negatives, but I’ll also offer some solutions. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been learning a bit about the mastering process with the recent Else and Pay the Devil recordings. It occurred to me while I was listening to the Else demo at work that it sounded better through iTunes than it did online. I attributed this to the EQ settings within iTunes and then thought,”Well, if this EQ sounds better, why don’t I just apply that to the track?”
Pay the Devil has released their first studio recording! We recorded reference tracks in late June and each band member then recorded solo tracks to the best of the reference tracks. After a few rounds of re-recordings and mixing, it was released to Bandcamp. Take a listen »
Else played last night at the Whammy Bar, has another show next weekend in Madison, and two shows set up in August now. We’re really settling into a groove with our setlists and having a great time playing. We’ve met some fantastic bands along the way and are going to look to set up more shows with them in the upcoming months. For complete details, check out Else’s calendar ».
Inspired by doing some clean recordings during the 48 Hour Film Fest, Pay the Devil has decided to do some multi-track recordings on a handful of originals and a few traditional tunes. We’re starting by extending the short cut of “Johnny” recorded with Of the North into a full song. That’ll serve as the “bonus track” listed last on the EP. We’re kicking things off with group recordings this afternoon and we’ll get as much individual tracking done as possible afterwards. Hopefully things are wrapped up in just a few weeks!
