Mix: So May It Secretly Begin

Project: Studio

Activity: Drums for Intro (8 bars)

Time Spent: 109 mins

Notes:

some tech difficulties today, first started with an annoying hum in my headset, I had moved a power strip into my rack bay cavity since I fear that it would get wet, we were getting tons of water coming from the back of our neighbor.

Secondly, can’t find a way of setting my locators start / end in Logic Pro X to the start / end of an arrangement section. Arrangment sections are a new feature in LPX which allow you to divide your tracks into music sections and thus then allowing one to move them and re-arrange

Added kick and snare accents to bars 7 and 8, btw, the project has a pickup bar so the intro actually starts on bar 2.
Overall, getting closer. When I superimpose my drum tracks on top of the original one can’t hear any overlapping flams etc

JM Verdiales Grade 0

Project: Classical Guitar

Activity: Bars 1 – 16

Time Spent: 40 mins

Notes:

I now have the “rasgueado” at bar #10 up to speed , the key is not to extend the rasgueado stroke up through the top E string i.e. 5432

So May it Secretly Begin

Project: Jazz Guitar

Activity: Guitar Line bars 41 – 49

Time Spent: 19 mins

Notes:

entire section is based on a pentatonic run starting on Bb the C, Eb, F , with slides and tasty accents nothing hard tech chops wise, just getting the feel
The Transcribe app is really helpful with this, currently toggling between 70% and full speed mostly worked on the first half i.e. bars 41 – 44

Mix: So May It Secretly Begin

Project: Studio

Activity: Drums for Intro (8 bars)

Time Spent: 103 mins

Notes:

Got rid of extra stick accents and left
4+ , 5.1+,5.2+, 5.4+
I hear a bell/ something on 5.3 , its really apparent at half speed, for now used a ride bell with a soft velocity curve and decreased its attack as compared to the ride tip line decreased pan for room mics which are on the ride etc

Leo Brouwer

Leo_brouwerI recently was reminded by a friend of the great guitar music of Leo Brouwer. I first encountered his music when taking classical guitar lessons at Miami-Dade Community College from the great Classical guitarist Carlos Molina.

Brouwer’s music is just really interesting.  His compositions are modern but they are Cuban.

I have now added Etude First Part from his Etudes Simples collection. HIs original score notates the piece at 104 although he doesn’t bother stating the tempo but notes when the piece should be finished in real time. However, Ricardo Cobo, in his Brouwer, Vol 1 albums play the piece at the more aggressive tempo of 184. In my opinion the syncopation of a piece really comes alive at the more aggressive tempos but in any case a great piece to study.

Below I have my rendition of the first few bars with some creative liberties added to give this snippet some sense of completion. I will work out the entire study and post that sometime later.

Brouwer 1 snippet

From Doodle to Music

from_doodle

 

Doodling is the act of just playing with abandon not really focused on being musical. Most of the time its at best relaxing, it can be exploratory if one is doing it over a changes i.e a chord progression but too much is a waste of time. Practice needs to be structured if one in going to progress so doodling in general is contrary to a serious musician’s objectives.

However, one area where a bit of doodling can be beneficial is in composing. Often , ideas come when one just let’s go and is free from the stress to produce. The key of course then would be to record your “doodling” and go  back and try to glean some musical lines.

For a recent doodle which like most of my doodles pretty much crappy run of the mouth line I went back and tried to salvage the underlying musical idea that was lurking in my subconscious at the time. What you see above is the notation of it and below is the audio for the midi playback.

It sounds better on the guitar. The performance includes slides and minor nuances that I can’t be bothered notating i.e. too difficult. Perhaps the transcription is not totally accurate though I think its quite close. You would not turn a lead sheet with all those rests but the cleaner lead sheet would have misleading playback i.e. more legatto than what I intend.

I’ll share a recorded guitar line later.

from doodle

Updated April 24th, 2013

from_doodle2

 

The above is a more accurate transcription of what I intend the line to be. This is amounting to the start of a solo as opposed to a melody.

Here’s the audio for it:

from doodle v2

The audio is just the midi playback for the scored line , the performance includes stylistic innuendo in the form of slide approaches which I will share.

Updated : 4/26/2013

Recorded guitar line:

from doodle v3 w guitar