New Collaboration Session on Indaba Music

A very talented song writer, Nick Gent has written a great song called "Respect, Then Love". He has given me an opportunity to record some violin tracks for the piece. Over the weekend, I came up with an interesting track to complement the varied styles incorporated in the piece. "World Music" is the genre that he labels the piece, there is a strange latin-jazz, European cafe vibe, but the basis of the piece is from his interaction with a friend from India, so I added a little "Raga" style too! 

Nick Gent's Picture on Indaba Music

 
Here's a sample mix of Nick Gent's "Respect, Then Love" with Kevan Paul on Violin:



 

New album to be released by April, 2012

There will be a new album released by April, 2012 with original compositions and exclusive recording production by Kevan Paul. The emphasis is on electric-violin in various fusion styles overlay-ed across a background of jazz-rock, smooth-jazz, and ambient electronic styles. The album will be initially available through Google Play, but will try to get published on iTunes, etc. as the project progresses. At least half of the songs will be added to the YouTube channel (2010media) to experiment with other visual elements and related ideas for the compositions. A more detailed description of the songs will be added to this web page. The name of the album is "Passing Through The Portal" which is also the name of track 4 of the album. The intent of the album is to continue the exploration of using electric-violin in fusion styles, especially where synthesizer sounds can be added and invented. The intent is to go beyond the dance-beat influences and provide an interesting sound-scape to overlay melodic violin to blend into an interesting ambient quality of sound. There are obvious influences from classical, new-age, jazz-rock fusion, and smooth-jazz that tend towards allowing the violin to create effortless melodies. This is the foundation for this album.

Remix Song: KP1-5.1 RIVENDELL, by Rick Wakeman

Click to Listen:

This song is short and sweet. I wanted to add violin to this song to demonstrate how acoustic piano and electric-violin work so well together, and move beyond the "classical" music cliches when other sonic elements are added. Of course Rick Wakeman and YES have been doing this for decades. YES has always been one of my favorite bands and I was listening to them extensively when I was a senior in high school (along with Led Zepplin, Moody Blues, etc.).

I recorded this for my brother Rex, as I am anxious to work with him on performing with him in the same style - acoustic piano and electric-violin. He mentioned that he wanted to learn to play the dumbek drum, so I thought "why not add the ceramic-drum sound to this piece?" If you read this brother, I hope this motivates you to find a piano and call me.

This song was re-mixed from the Rick Wakeman album "The Lord of the Rings". Rivendell means the "deep valley of the cleft" (see Rivendell in WikiPedia), and was the valley that Bilbo Baggens stopped with the dwarves before going to the Lonely Mountain. In this case, we are coming back from the lonely mountain, and are traveling back to the mythical "home". I love Rick Wakeman's work, and would like to add electric-violin to some of the other solo pieces -- although I find solo piano soothing, it always beckons me to add violin to it.

Although this is a short piece, it took me all day to rehearse and edit the violin tracks. Rick Wakeman is absolutely masterful on piano, and I wanted to be as precise as possible with this piece --- I would love to perform this live.

Thanks for everyone who has listened to these songs -- there will be about 15-20 songs posted by the end of November, 2008, so keep coming back for more musical analysis, comments on home-recording techniques, and electric-violin experimentation.

New Song: KP1-1.4 TOUR de FRANCE", composed and arranged by Kevan Paul

Click to Listen:


This song is an original composition based on creating a feeling of progression and freedom at the same time. The title and content was inspired by the band Kraftwerk who created a song about the Tour de France. This song becomes a natural addition to an album about healing, as Lance Armstrong is a perfect example for the difficultly in healing and how hard work and effort can make the body and mind stronger and overcome adversity and impediments.

Note 1:
The song cataloging system that I'm using to keep track of the mix-downs that I like is the reason for the numbering in front of the song title. KP1 refers to this first recording project, the 1.4 indicates the first finished song, with the fourth mix-down as the preferred track. As time goes on, I may post all versions of the mix-down and let people vote on the one they like best.

The Analog-To-MIDI Odyssey:
There are elements in the song that come from the attempt to convert the analog signal from the violin to a MIDI file using the WidiSoft Analog-to-MIDI-AU (MAC Audio-Unit) plug-in, but I was using the demo version of the plug-in and would only get 15 seconds of data with 30 second gaps in-between. This actually turned out to be a good thing, because the default settings of the plug-in produces too many data points, whiich totally choked the GarageBand application on the MACBOOK. I tried to match the MIDI file with the time-line, and then cut-out the blank spots, then attempted to change the MIDI instrument to something with synthesizer strings to make it sound "electronic" on purpose. This was not very successful; I actually recording the first takes in August, but tabled the recording. I pulled it out again for this album project and tried to cut-out the parts of the violin jam that seemed annoying to me. I never could get a clean play-back before October 1st, because of all the extra MIDI notes that the MAC could not process fast enough, but then I finially found out that I could lock all of the tracks before play-back and this would limit the processing power needed. This saved this song from the scrap-heap.

I added the diffusion pitch-bend of the RaySpace plug-in to the primary violin track, but this seemed a little overwhelming. One of the violin-to-MIDI samples were interesting enough to convert to a Fretless Bass part, and another was converted to a synthesizer-Cello-Ensemble-with-Trills. I still thought the piece sounded too busy, until I accidently muted the primary violin track on mix-down attempt number 4 --- this yielded a version that I liked because it allowed the MIDI-modified parts to be heard, I had lowered the bass track(s) volume, and the RaySpace pitch-bend was kept on one of the tracks.

I hope to purchase and learn how to use the WIDISoft plug-in better, but the sampling I did taught me that I need a lot of time tweaking the sensitivity and polyphonic settings to get the right amount of sampled data-points. This idea of analog-to-MIDI conversion has been attempted by me before by playing through the Vocorder option on the Yamaha PSR-740; with similar mixed results (not optimal). I never recorded any of these experiments, but I am still looking for the analog-to-MIDI option. I know Barcus-Berry has an electric-violin that has a MIDI output feature, but I'm trying to find my own alternative until I can afford such an instrument.

Back to the song:
The end-result is a composition that gives me the feeling that I'm riding in the middle of the Tour de France Peloton with the whirring of the wheels, and the constant uphill climb characterized by the ascending violin parts. Overall this was a satisfying experiment in using the sound modifications to the violin track and then having fun with mixing other rhythmic elements. And I love the RaySpace reverb tool for giving the violin the natural ambience that it needs to sound like a Stradavarius in the concert-hall! You'll hear what I'm talking about later when I jam with cello tracks from Yo-Yo Ma's solo cello recordings.

I think I got the French sound right, as I just listened to a song on Pandora called Belle, by Alif Tree, from the album French Cuisine that has a similar mode, melodic line movement, etc.
http://www.pandora.com/music/album/alif+tree/french+cuisine