January 9, 2014

New Year, New Tune

In spite of the title of this post, this song has actually been percolating since April of last year, but I just got around to finishing it.  It originally had a different (more macabre) title and was going to wind up going a completely different direction.  Such is the life of music.

If "Wombats In Estrus (Parts 1, 2, and 3)" sounds awfully silly, that's because it is.  One of the great benefits of writing songs without words is that song titles can be just about anything (see, Zappa, Frank and National Health, among others, for some wonderful examples).  I jotted down the title sometime last year becsuse it reminded me of King Crimson's "Larks Tongues in Aspic."  Given the history of that tune (4 parts spread over three records), it seemed to fit what this piece became.

"Wombats . . ." is based around two notes that spawn the bass lines, chords, and the melodic bits.  It wasn't planned that way, but it turned out pretty well.  Part 1 (heavilly indebted to OMD's "New Stone Age") is more synth-poppy, while Part 2 is more ambient and spooky.  Part 2 includes samples from Freesound  (193818__geoneo0__four-voices-whispering-6-wecho by geoneo0) and a Sony collection called Rabbit Asylum (The Stuttered 00's), which is as weird as the name suggests.  Part 3 was originally it's own separate bit, but I thought it tied things together nicely (the drum pattern is indebted to "Astonomic Club" from Air's soundtrack for Le voyage dans la lune).

Equipment wise, this tune relies heavily on two of my older bits of kit, the Korg M50 workstation and the Alesis Micron virtual analog synth.  There's also some (virtual) Yamaha CS80 in the midsection and, of course, some (virtual) Mellotron in Part 3.  The final melodic bit in Part 3 is from the Nord Lead 2X.  None of that matters to most of you, but somebody might find it interesting.

So, enjoy "Wombats In Estrus (Parts 1, 2, and 3)"!

No comments:

Post a Comment