It may not technically be April any more, but I have reworked the bits of Time Flies that were bugging me and I think this new (and slightly longer) version is worth uploading anyway – so here it is:

Time Flies v2

The most obvious changes are in the structure around the first bridge section.  There’s also a bit more synth in there.

April is officially over!  That means my Month of Music has come to an end.  I did manage to post four completed songs (plus one kind of rough instrumental, Nightfall), so I’d say that makes it a success.  I’m pleased with what I got done, although it would be nice to have got Time Flies sorted out properly – it still needs some real work in places.

On the other hand, Horizon and Wolf both came together very quickly and worked out well.  I’m also happy with the final results of Dreamscape.  None of the recordings are all that polished, but that was never my intention, and they certainly don’t sound bad considering the time I had to put them all together.

All that was just a rambling way of rounding up the month and finishing with a post which includes links to all the final tracks, as you may have noticed.  I may well post an updated version of Time Flies when I get it reworked to my satisfaction.

Since this month went quite well, I might well decide to repeat the exercise at some point – there’s no chance of getting a free enough month until at least September, but I’ll see how it goes.

I’m still working on Time Flies (formerly known as sketch8) and making a little progress.  I thought I would share my small improvements to the intro, as I think that although it isn’t really much, it has made a big difference to the overall effect.

Time Flies – Improved Intro

I decided to develop sketch6 a bit more today.  I haven’t gone too far with it, as I like the sparser sound on this piece.  The guitar melody over the top is a single take with no editing.  This is a (fairly) short, simple piece to provide a bit of relief from the heavier sounds on most of my other tunes.

Nightfall

Well, my Latin translations haven’t been confirmed by any kind souls, but I’ve pressed on with Time Flies anyway.  Of the songs I’ve posted this month, this is the one I’m most unsure of.  Parts of it great, but there are bits I’d like to do some considerable work on too.  For that reason, this may not actually be the last version of the song I’ll post.  It is, however, finished enough to count towards my target and be the fourth song I’ve written and recorded this month.

Time Flies

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I’ve now got a third song completed (or completed enough, at least!).  Dreamscape started life as sketch7 a couple of weeks ago before I added lyrics and a title a couple of days ago.  I recorded the vocals fairly quickly today and also added some little embellishments here and there.  I have to say that I think this one has come out pretty well and even though there are a couple of things I’m not entirely sure about, they don’t sound bad.  It’s just that they might be better if I could work out what it is that’s not right.

Dreamscape

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It looks like this weekend is when I either succeed or fail.  Bearing that in mind, I decided to take a line and a half of lyrics that I scribbled down the other day and run with them.  I finally realised today that they were exactly the sort of thing I’d been looking for to go with a couple of riffs I posted way back on the first of the month:  sketch2 and sketch4.

I’ve had a completed backing track built around these riffs lying around for two or three weeks now and I was starting to think I’d never have the words to make it into a song (I’ve got a track that’s been in the same same state since November 06, so it isn’t that far-fetched).  But here we are – three hours after starting to write the lyrics, I’ve bounced down a complete demo track and I’m writing a blog post about the whole thing.

Wolf

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Presumably I have dreams all the time, but I never remember them, so I’m not sure why I decided to write a song about them.  Nonetheless, that is precisely what I have just done.

Last night I was looking for lyrics for sketch7-1 and, after deciding that the various ideas I had scribbled down didn’t really fit, I played it back once more.  For some reason it gave me the impression of driving down a road at night, and almost immediately the first couple of lines popped into my head.

 

I’m heading down a road – don’t know where it’s leading

Still I find I’m in a hurry to arrive

 

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I mentioned yesterday that sketch8 was likely to grow a bit more somewhere in the middle.  That has happened this evening with this rather interesting section being shoe-horned in:

sketch8-3

Since the track had already turned into a bit of a progressive epic, I felt that a time signature change wouldn’t be out of place, and since the first two lines of lyrics for this section were a bit longer than the other four it seemed appropriate.  The lyrics are all about time in one way or another too, so maybe it did really need to be in there! Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just barely completed a post contemplating my progress at the half-way point, and suddenly two thirds of the month are gone!  I suppose it is time to stop examining my progress and actually make some…

To that end, I have continued work on the rather epic track which still rejoices in the title “sketch8″.  It now has lots of lyrics (assorted musings on the theme of “time” appropriately enough – no prizes for guessing where the inspiration for that sprang from!).  In fact there is a short section of lyrics which I would like to include but which doesn’t fit into the music as it stands at the moment.  I’m happy with the structure leading up to the end, right up to the lovely little accident that makes up the last few seconds, but I am not at all averse to squeezing a few more lines into the middle somewhere.  The song is only eight minutes long at the moment after all, so there’s definitely room for more in there somewhere.

Here is a chunk from somewhere near the end which I have been working on this evening:

sketch8-2

Some nice heavy riffs, with the vocals still conspicuously absent at this point.  Much of that part is supposed to have vocals on it, but I haven’t recorded any yet, so it doesn’t.

(Listening back to that, the synth is much too loud during most of that part.  Try to pretend it isn’t for now and I’ll fix it later!)

To be continued…