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.

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.

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.

New Song: KP1-6.2 SOLAR ENERGY, composed and arranged by Kevan Paul

Click to Listen:



This song is written in a traditional jazz idiom, so it reflects a style developed well by Jon Luc Ponty, Regina Carter, Charlie Bishart, and other great jazz-violinists.

The song title "Solar Energy" reflects the flow of the song, from slow sunrise, to intense noon-day sun, and final sunset. The use of the sun for our daily energy needs is available to all humans on the planet. No more excuses for not building the infrastructure to support this process. We all need to be solar-energy pioneers right now! This is my anthem to that process.

The use of the midi-converted violin melody provides the basis of the synthesizer effects. I started working on this piece in August, but it was not developing as I wanted. Yesterday, it seemed to come together, and the last violin track I used was not edited at all -- this could be considered a live performance from that perspective. No recording tricks on the violin --- that's the real deal.

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