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.
I got a little crazy at Of the North’s last set at Bremen Cafe in Riverwest. I set down the cello for a song and picked up the spoons! I started learning spoons less than a week before the gig, so I kept it fairly simple, but I think it went really well.
I spent about 30 minutes late on a Sunday night learning to play spoons. I picked it up fairly quickly and was able to play through one Of the North song. I still have a lot of work to do to first get my grip to be more solid and consistent, and then to add some more tricks.
This last New Year’s Eve Eve Of the North played a gig at Tonic Tavern with Pay the Devil. The show was absolutely amazing with a great turnout, a receptive audience, and a really fun opening act. This was my first show with the full band and it couldn’t have gone any better. Read the rest of this entry »
I caught Allen Russel, a multi-instrumentalist and composer I know from UWM, playing violin with the Milwaukee Hot Club on Saturday night. Allen played mandolin on one of my pieces during school, Irresolution. The show was great overall, and this tunes was one of the highlights of the night.
An FX, samples, and drums based soundtrack to the trailer for Fatal Frame. Sounds come from the True Strike Tension pack for Kore Player, and a few other various sample packs.
A post-rock soundtrack for a video tribute to the video game series, Myst. Electronic samples come from Absynth, and guitars were recorded on my ESP LTC EC1000 Deluxe using a Line6 POD X3 Live.
An arrangement of “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for string quartet. The MIDI rendering was done through EWQL Symphonic Gold and the performance is by the Echelon String Quartet.
