Concept: Garden

This concept came to me in a dream sometime a few years back, and as soon as I woke up I picked up my acoustic guitar and figured it out and recorded it. Here's the original recording from 2009, recorded on my MacBook via the built-in microphone so the quality is really terrible, but you can hear the birth of the melodic idea.

Original Recording on Acoustic Guitar (2/12/2009)

In my dream I saw myself walking around in a garden that was hovering over a lake. It had giant plants and flowers, and in the middle of the garden was a tree made up entirely of my own hands. I had also drawn a picture of this and blogged about it back then.

Playing Tree (2/2009)

Recently, I re-recorded the same melody on my electric tuned in standard A, and here it can be heard much clearly. This will be the basis for the whole track. I intend to make this a slow, ambient piece for most part of it and recreate feel of the dream. And then towards the end have a surprising, heavy distorted guitar riff. The visuals will also follow the same pattern. Most part of it will be set in a garden like space with the protagonist hovering/walking around and exploring the garden and its life forms. And towards the end, there will be a drastic change, I'm not sure what this change will be, but I'm working on it.

Recorded on electric guitar (5/2011)

Music Ambient layers

I've added in the ambient layers of the track. Most of the ambient string sounds were designed with NI Kore Player. There's also a few tracks of my voice here and there creating the choir like.

This also features the bass played by Brandon. I've edited his performance here and there just a little to make them sit more tightly over the kick.

Next, I'm going to rent out a 7 string guitar from a the local guitar shop and re-track all the guitars.

Dance cues

The motion in the dance sequence is going to reflect the motion in the guitar's melody. The melody is basically playing over a 4/4 time signature but going in and out of phase with the up and down beats. The dance will reflect this.

I've created a motion cue for both the dancers. These motion cues (ting and ding sounds panned left and right) will act as a "force" which causes them to change their pose.

This way their motions will be somewhat independent and organized in time, and my hope is that it reduces the visual chaos of that scene a little, and will reinforce the rhythmic structure of the music via visual, motion coherence.

Music Done!

I spent the whole weekend on developing the music, with the Pod X3 that my friend lent me. It was so much fun experimenting with it. Here's the first draft of the music. I have mixed it, but I think I'll go in and re-record some parts of it for more clarity, and have someone else mix it for me if possible.

More sound tests

A generous friend of mine lent me his Pod X3, now the guitar sounds so much more cleaner! For now, there's just one ambient guitar track on it, I'll try out more sounds this weekend.



Working on developing the soundscapes.

Music - First attempts

Forbidden #1 by Ganesh Rao

Forbidden #2 by Ganesh Rao

Music Concept & References

To establish the other worldly mood, I plan to use atmospheric guitar sound scapes through out the piece. Plus, I plan to experiment with varied time signatures and poly rhythms, which I believe help create minimal music with a strong groove. It involves overlapping different time signatures, and the different grooves go in and out of phase which I think has a mind-bending quality.

TesseracT - Concealing Fate

The intro clean guitar motif has such a strong ambient feel. It is contrasted with the heavy over-driven guitars in the background. The clean guitar pretty much stays the same through out the piece and maintains the atmosphere, while the other instruments take the liberty to travel around. The chorus here has that groovy feel that I was talking about earlier.

Massive Attack - Dissolved Girl

This again has that quality, where the electronic drums and the repetitive samples establish the main groove and stays constant through out the piece while everything else wanders around it. The bass is very heavy and almost loud in the mix, which I believe is done purposely because it makes a kind of meditative mood. You could almost just focus on the bass line and reach a trance state of mind.

Music Draft #1