Week #43 - Shame

I'm not sure this song is immediately evocative of a negative feeling like 'shame', but somehow it does make me feel ashamed. Maybe everything in a major key just sounds trite or contrived to me, but I really feel like this might be the most unoriginal piece I've put together so far, and that is a shame:



Description:

This piece started, rather oddly for me, with some lyrics. I had an idea for a song about not absolute certainty leading to embarassment, and the melody just sort of came with the words. I ended up not being able to get very far with the lyrics, but I wrote the rest of this piece around the that melody, beginning with a piano and eventually breaking it up amongst other instrumentation.

Tools:

Propellerhead Reason 4/Record 1
Epiphone Les Paul Custom electric guitar

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Notes:

- The melody that began the piece is played here by the trumpet. I didn't really do anything to the preset sampler patch but add some reverb.

- The answer to these statements, heard here as the the bell line, were next. Reverb, this time in the form of a delay effect, was again my only addition to the preset.

- Once I had these, I derived the chords, played on both my own electric guitar as well as a sampled guitar combinator from Reason, and bass part, which is a sampled acoustic bass playing whole notes on the root of each chord for the most part. The chord progression is:
F | C | Dm | C | F | C | Dm | Dm-C-Dm-Em |
F | C | Dm | C | F | C | Dm | Gm |
F | C | Dm | Am | Bb | C | F | F |

- As the whole thing was originally transcribed with a sampled piano, I added the piano back in on the final verse/chorus. The arrangement is quite simple - verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle8-verse-chorus, and I just tried to expand each time through the verse-chorus to include more and be more interesting.

- The only mixing I did was setting levels and pan position and using the various sends (reverb/delay) and dynamic processing in Record's mixer. The sound of this mixer really is amazing. I never worked much with hardware mixers, so it's taken some getting used to, but the quality is really amazing.


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