Since this song has received comments on the blog, I've re-mixed again to sound better. Thanks for input from JS54inMO; I agree with your observations. I re-mixed the recording with less volume on the shaker, fixed some note discrepancies on the violin and balanced the violin with the guitar better. Hope you like the new rendition better. - Kevan
Showing posts with label New Age music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Age music. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Sunday, March 22, 2009
New Song "A Better Way to Leave" (KP2-03) on "Going Home"
This new song started with a "pop" drum track at a moderate 104 bpm, and I want to continue to explore the "arppegio" synthesizer further as substitution for the traditional "rhythm guitar" track -- all the notes are there in a guitar chord, you just hear them all at once. Then I wanted to add an electric-violin track that emulated the electric guitar some more, as was introduced in the previous song "Through the Fog". For the violin, I wanted to add 1/5 up pitch and use double-stops for a melody that would further develop the mandolin introduction. It starts as if it is a country-pop song, but then is fused into a original melodic style that keeps the pop-drums and syncopated bass part as a constant counter-point to the violin part. Difficult to blend some of these elements, but I like the overall up-beat feeling that the song delivers. The title implies that there is a better way to leave a situation when there is a choice - pick the better way to leave the conversation, and you will be able to find a way back. Stay positive in thought and action - create peace! That's the meaning of this song.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
New Song KP2-02-Through The Fog
This new song has all of the jazz fusion elements that I want to hear in my compositions: 1. violin melodies with song form. "Verse - Verse - Break improvisation - Transition - Verse - Verse" 2. electronic rhythmic contrast parts 3. electric-violin solo that sounds like an electric-guitar solo (during transition) 4. vocal overlay with ambient choral effect. 5. jazz elements for violin phrases. The themes are stated, extended, and then repeated, with jazz improvisation in the middle section. 6. syncopated bass parts. If I can have these elements in each song on the "Going Home" album, then the collection should sound coherent and easy to follow. Hopefully, I can extend this framework to the next group of songs. Enjoy!
Saturday, November 01, 2008
New Song: "MELTDOWN" (KP1-9.4), composed and arranged by Kevan Paul
Click to Listen:
This song had a lot of different stages in development. The exciting part for me was getting the electric-violin sounds to blend with sounds that are orchestral and neo-classical. The synthesizer parts are created directly from other violin parts that were extracted out later, leaving a unique style of creating synthesizer parts. Another thing that I learned was how to adjust the software-instrument tracks to align with the tempo. This has made a big difference in my confidence in mixing the real instruments with the software-instruments. The drums were created via the Digitech GNX4. I like having the drums throughout even though the style is neo-classical. The violin parts were mixed from multi-take sections over a two-week period.
The theme of the music came from several ideas. The "MELTDOWN" that came to mind, was the recent financial meltdown with the banking industry and the global economic reprecussions that have been set in motion. The global economy is now one form of a "meltdown" that will affect everyone in a negative way, but the MELTDOWN in my original thoughts goes back to the theme of the album, which is about HEALING. There are many times that we feel emotionally drained, and this affects our health in a negative way --- just like the global economic meltdown. When we are emotionally "hi-jacked" by other people's anger and unkindness, we can often feel like we are experiencing an emotional meltdown. Nothing good seems to come from this burst of mental and physical stress, and sometimes we carry our resentment and anger with us until we have a moment of complete emotional meltdown that causes us to feel defeated, alone, and sometimes hopeless. Keeping the peptides in the brain going at a high rate to bring back the emotional state that we are addicted to, can be draining. Everyone has their own set of peptide addictions with their brain -- we are all addicted to our own set of emotions. When we can no longer keep up with ourselves and our "self-fullfilling-prophecies", we can enter a mental state of suspended reality - an emotional MELTDOWN.
Sometimes we cannot change our emotional state to the better state, and our ability to cope with the world, and the demands of living seem to over-power our better selves. Sometimes we refuse to change the course of our thoughts and actions until there is a complete "emotional collapse" or "nervous breakdown". People will sometimes fight themselves over and over again, rather than make the necessary mental or physical adjustments to establish their well-being. And sometimes, our brains cannot heal themselves without chemical intervention -- but so little is known about the brain that we struggle to find a solution from pharmaceutical science. There is never a easy solution to recover from our emotional "meltdowns", but we have to keep trying to find a solution for ourselves -- we all want to be happy and live comfortably with our thoughts.
This song had a lot of different stages in development. The exciting part for me was getting the electric-violin sounds to blend with sounds that are orchestral and neo-classical. The synthesizer parts are created directly from other violin parts that were extracted out later, leaving a unique style of creating synthesizer parts. Another thing that I learned was how to adjust the software-instrument tracks to align with the tempo. This has made a big difference in my confidence in mixing the real instruments with the software-instruments. The drums were created via the Digitech GNX4. I like having the drums throughout even though the style is neo-classical. The violin parts were mixed from multi-take sections over a two-week period.
The theme of the music came from several ideas. The "MELTDOWN" that came to mind, was the recent financial meltdown with the banking industry and the global economic reprecussions that have been set in motion. The global economy is now one form of a "meltdown" that will affect everyone in a negative way, but the MELTDOWN in my original thoughts goes back to the theme of the album, which is about HEALING. There are many times that we feel emotionally drained, and this affects our health in a negative way --- just like the global economic meltdown. When we are emotionally "hi-jacked" by other people's anger and unkindness, we can often feel like we are experiencing an emotional meltdown. Nothing good seems to come from this burst of mental and physical stress, and sometimes we carry our resentment and anger with us until we have a moment of complete emotional meltdown that causes us to feel defeated, alone, and sometimes hopeless. Keeping the peptides in the brain going at a high rate to bring back the emotional state that we are addicted to, can be draining. Everyone has their own set of peptide addictions with their brain -- we are all addicted to our own set of emotions. When we can no longer keep up with ourselves and our "self-fullfilling-prophecies", we can enter a mental state of suspended reality - an emotional MELTDOWN.
Sometimes we cannot change our emotional state to the better state, and our ability to cope with the world, and the demands of living seem to over-power our better selves. Sometimes we refuse to change the course of our thoughts and actions until there is a complete "emotional collapse" or "nervous breakdown". People will sometimes fight themselves over and over again, rather than make the necessary mental or physical adjustments to establish their well-being. And sometimes, our brains cannot heal themselves without chemical intervention -- but so little is known about the brain that we struggle to find a solution from pharmaceutical science. There is never a easy solution to recover from our emotional "meltdowns", but we have to keep trying to find a solution for ourselves -- we all want to be happy and live comfortably with our thoughts.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
New Song: (KP1-11.2) Scrub Your Mind, original composition by Kevan Paul
Click to Listen:
This new song was recorded over the last week with the attempt to develop a song form similar to a Sonata form. The piece begins with a solo Electric-Violin with "ambient" reverb and echo (delay), that is very free-flow and melodic, then moves into a rhythmic dance with violin "jam", and finishes with highly modified violin-turned-electro added to pulses of synthesizer patterns with various voices. The "highly modified" violin track would not be recognized as a violin, but gives a unique tone that would also not be recognized as a sythesizer or midi sound either.
The purpose of this piece is to express the different aspects of the electric-violin experiments that I am engaged in; the inclusion of modern free-form ambient instrumentals, straight-up dance rhythms, and electronic analog-to-digital-constructions, are all elements that I want to continue to explore in upcoming music albums. I have a great desire to take some familiar music (such as Christmas songs), and create an album with these combined musical elements. I'm leaning towards a Christmas music album for my next solo instrumental project (hopefully done before Christmas of this year).
The tools that I have been working on this week are Widisoft v1.21 AU - Analog-to-MIDI plugin, and G7 (by Sibelius). I've been having a terrible time with Garageband freezing up, but I finially realized that I only have 1GB of RAM in the Powerbook G4 1.67GHZ that I'm trying to use. This is at least upgradable to 2GB; so I'm now focused on getting this upgrade to see if it helps with the Garageband issues. I don't dare try using other audio tools yet, if I can get Garageband to behave, I'm sure it would be worse to try to use LogicPro, or CuBase (plus I don't know how to use these applications). I'm slowly getting more proficient in the recording process that I'm attempting to define, but I want to take a step-back from the technology "tweaking" and find a good balance between the development of musical ideas and the necessary technical precision.
I've been doing research on the Creative Commons licensing process and will place all of my original recordings and music-videos with a Creative Commons license to allow others to freely distribute and use as long as attribution is maintained. This may not be significant for the first "album" of music presented on this blog, but moving forward into the next few years, I plan on distribution of the music via the JAMENDO website. The JAMENDO site is dedicated to the Creative Commons method of distribution. The recent release of the RADIOHEAD album and music video with a Creative Commons license indicates that this will be moving into a mainstream media distribution mode, and hopefully there will be a convergence of traditional corporate media and creative individuals where the two parties can mutually benefit from the creative process (i.e. share-the-wealth) without being encumbered with copyright litigation. All of my projects will be allowed to be licensed for commercial purposes with the open-contract for mutual benefit, and I will do everything I can to stay within the boundaries of the Creative Commons licensing process and give credit to others whose material I reuse to the purposes of music and art development.
The whole album "Healing, Again, Forever" will be available on JAMENDO for download in about a month.
I'm also planning on a corresponding YouTube music-video for each song that will include as much photographic and graphic data that I have produced, as well as anything that I can find via a Creative-Commons license to remix and give credit to the author; this will hopefully build some bridges toward collaboration -- which is the real goal for this project.
KP1-11.2 Scrub Your Mind by Kevan Paul is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
This new song was recorded over the last week with the attempt to develop a song form similar to a Sonata form. The piece begins with a solo Electric-Violin with "ambient" reverb and echo (delay), that is very free-flow and melodic, then moves into a rhythmic dance with violin "jam", and finishes with highly modified violin-turned-electro added to pulses of synthesizer patterns with various voices. The "highly modified" violin track would not be recognized as a violin, but gives a unique tone that would also not be recognized as a sythesizer or midi sound either.
The purpose of this piece is to express the different aspects of the electric-violin experiments that I am engaged in; the inclusion of modern free-form ambient instrumentals, straight-up dance rhythms, and electronic analog-to-digital-constructions, are all elements that I want to continue to explore in upcoming music albums. I have a great desire to take some familiar music (such as Christmas songs), and create an album with these combined musical elements. I'm leaning towards a Christmas music album for my next solo instrumental project (hopefully done before Christmas of this year).
The tools that I have been working on this week are Widisoft v1.21 AU - Analog-to-MIDI plugin, and G7 (by Sibelius). I've been having a terrible time with Garageband freezing up, but I finially realized that I only have 1GB of RAM in the Powerbook G4 1.67GHZ that I'm trying to use. This is at least upgradable to 2GB; so I'm now focused on getting this upgrade to see if it helps with the Garageband issues. I don't dare try using other audio tools yet, if I can get Garageband to behave, I'm sure it would be worse to try to use LogicPro, or CuBase (plus I don't know how to use these applications). I'm slowly getting more proficient in the recording process that I'm attempting to define, but I want to take a step-back from the technology "tweaking" and find a good balance between the development of musical ideas and the necessary technical precision.
I've been doing research on the Creative Commons licensing process and will place all of my original recordings and music-videos with a Creative Commons license to allow others to freely distribute and use as long as attribution is maintained. This may not be significant for the first "album" of music presented on this blog, but moving forward into the next few years, I plan on distribution of the music via the JAMENDO website. The JAMENDO site is dedicated to the Creative Commons method of distribution. The recent release of the RADIOHEAD album and music video with a Creative Commons license indicates that this will be moving into a mainstream media distribution mode, and hopefully there will be a convergence of traditional corporate media and creative individuals where the two parties can mutually benefit from the creative process (i.e. share-the-wealth) without being encumbered with copyright litigation. All of my projects will be allowed to be licensed for commercial purposes with the open-contract for mutual benefit, and I will do everything I can to stay within the boundaries of the Creative Commons licensing process and give credit to others whose material I reuse to the purposes of music and art development.
The whole album "Healing, Again, Forever" will be available on JAMENDO for download in about a month.
I'm also planning on a corresponding YouTube music-video for each song that will include as much photographic and graphic data that I have produced, as well as anything that I can find via a Creative-Commons license to remix and give credit to the author; this will hopefully build some bridges toward collaboration -- which is the real goal for this project.
KP1-11.2 Scrub Your Mind by Kevan Paul is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
New Song: (KP1-8.5) SACRED MUSIC (LONELY NIGHTS), composed and arranged by Kevan Paul
Click to Listen:
This song came from a combination of several ideas. The first element was a riff that I kept hearing on the guitar and wanted to incorporate. The second element was the flute and drums as the basis of sacred music for native cultures, especially natives of North America. The third element was finding a process for gathering the melody and chord structure together. The first and second elements were easy because I already had some melodic content in my head that I wanted to develop -- especially the flute and violin trading melodic lines.
The title was changed from "Lonely Nights" to "Sacred Music" during the course of the week that I worked on this piece. The intent for the first title was a reflection of the idea that for someone to produce something on a creative level, there needs to be often lonely and quiet moments in time that allow the mind to assemble and "get-in-tune" with the ideas that are getting the "creative-attention". Then yesterday I heard the quote that "music is love, looking for expression", and I wanted to change the title to reflect that music can be a sacred experience, and can have great healing strength. This is in keeping with the theme of this album of songs. If there needed to be a sub-title, it would be "Lonely Nights", as I think back to all of the time that I've spent in my life practicing music, reading, thinking by myself at night. This is a necessary sacrifice, as I do not have the luxury of being able to go to work everyday as a musician --- my music must be attended to at nights and on weekends. For me, "sacred music" and "lonely nights" go hand-in-hand.
The third element of composition process was the hard one. I have tried several software tools in the course of the last week working on this song, but so far I'm not coming up with a process that works for me. When a composer starts with a melody, the chord structure can be a stumbling block to getting the musical ideas written or recorded. When learning someone's song, it is easier to dissect the chord arrangement as a first step; composing seems to be a bit different than that for me, but I want to follow correct musical principles of arranging the chord progressions, etc. I will continue my investigation into finding the right mix of tools and processes to help me build the original songs and compositions that I want to produce.
This song came from a combination of several ideas. The first element was a riff that I kept hearing on the guitar and wanted to incorporate. The second element was the flute and drums as the basis of sacred music for native cultures, especially natives of North America. The third element was finding a process for gathering the melody and chord structure together. The first and second elements were easy because I already had some melodic content in my head that I wanted to develop -- especially the flute and violin trading melodic lines.
The title was changed from "Lonely Nights" to "Sacred Music" during the course of the week that I worked on this piece. The intent for the first title was a reflection of the idea that for someone to produce something on a creative level, there needs to be often lonely and quiet moments in time that allow the mind to assemble and "get-in-tune" with the ideas that are getting the "creative-attention". Then yesterday I heard the quote that "music is love, looking for expression", and I wanted to change the title to reflect that music can be a sacred experience, and can have great healing strength. This is in keeping with the theme of this album of songs. If there needed to be a sub-title, it would be "Lonely Nights", as I think back to all of the time that I've spent in my life practicing music, reading, thinking by myself at night. This is a necessary sacrifice, as I do not have the luxury of being able to go to work everyday as a musician --- my music must be attended to at nights and on weekends. For me, "sacred music" and "lonely nights" go hand-in-hand.
The third element of composition process was the hard one. I have tried several software tools in the course of the last week working on this song, but so far I'm not coming up with a process that works for me. When a composer starts with a melody, the chord structure can be a stumbling block to getting the musical ideas written or recorded. When learning someone's song, it is easier to dissect the chord arrangement as a first step; composing seems to be a bit different than that for me, but I want to follow correct musical principles of arranging the chord progressions, etc. I will continue my investigation into finding the right mix of tools and processes to help me build the original songs and compositions that I want to produce.
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