The River

This is a song from near the end of the story. Christian gets to the River (of Death) and sees the Celestial City on the other side. This song was originally supposed to be a start for Celestial City, but took on a life of its own. I like the guitar mix, with the trusty Mesa Boogie Rectifier patch on the Johnson J-Station in the left speaker, more standard distortion with more highs from the Mark I setting on the Sansamp PSA1 plugin, and acoustic. The guitar mix gives a great modern rock feel. I also like the chords in the chorus.

Still needs guitar lead, which will be added in the future.

Access the MP3 from the links on the right

Do Something Different

Do Something Different is the post today on one of my favorite blogs - The AIR Users Blog for Pro Tools.

On it Russell talks about a reality show competition in Britain where musicians competed to be an orchestra conductor. One of the musicians was a rap artist named Goldie. He didn't win the vote, although he showed the most promise.

But Russell takes the opportunity to challenge musicians to try something different - particularly a different style of music. Try something outside the box.

I have done that on many songs in this project. Dream was an experiment with a swelling string patch in Xpand virtual instrument.
Gatekeeper was a 5/4 section of a song.

Confrontation was an effort to make a whole instrumental song without words, letting the parts tell the story.

Celestial City, which I am currently working on, is an orchestral thing that sounds like a film score. Like Gary said, "this has to be big" as the finale to the project. And I was inspired by Jared Kraft and his film scores.

Earlier tonight I learned how to play Here Comes the Song with a capo on the 7th fret of an acoustic guitar.

I've never owned a capo before. I always thought it was lazy when I could just do a barre chord. But the texture is different. With the capo higher, the acoustic sounds like a mandolin.

If you are a musician, try something new. You may be surprised what you come up with.

Celestial City

Finally work is done on the song Celestial City without it turning into something else.

Today, spent eight hours working on the song, scoring tracks with violins, timpani, choirs, etc. And some tasty time signature changes. Scoring choir harmony vocal parts and trying to find the right tone in the mass of plug-ins took the longest.

Access the MP3 from the links on the right.

So this is where the muse leads?

Worked on the song Celestial City the last two weekends. Both times it turned into something else. So now I have new idea stubs. I like the vibe of this one.

Idea3 MP3

This is the song from last week. In the story Christian looks across the river to the Celestial City.

The River MP3

Still a work in progress...