This has a solid 4/4 riff based groovy tempo, no guitar wanking (well some where appropriate) and no vocals not to scare anyone off with the prog label, I only call it that because of the evolving cinematic structure. But it has sort of a driving dance groove all the way through once the main song theme starts, no odd time signatures etc. It has it's peaks and buildups. Just listen to it.
Ok, so I have not posted many of my complete songs, if at all. I might have posted a terribly mixed version of this a few years back in some thread and not the music cafe. I have a couple other "songs" that could fit some sort of "journey" album concept with this one
This song was originally recorded in 2005/2006 at some point, and was a collaboration with a friend, after a night of jamming, and we sat down at his computer and he asked me about the improv riffs I was playing while he was on the drums. He kept telling me to play them, and before long he had constructed a drum loop track, and he said let's record this cool idea and make this a song. I played all the guitar parts, save for one four bar section in the middle break, and he played the crazy chromatic solos after the middle break. He also laid down an incredible bass line on a real bass guitar that drives the song along, and is almost the focal point of the song. That was the main song idea, and then I expanded on it over a period of time. I wanted to make this kind of a prog track, with not just guitars being the main focus (something I had never really done or accomplished).
I added a kind of cinematic intro. Like the name of the track, I wanted to take the listener on a journey, so it doesn't start out jamming right away. I added ear synth candy and hand percussion loops to give it some ethnic theme to go along with the scale structure, and then I came up with the name and concept.
This was done on mostly free "vintage" vst/vsti (Does 5 years in the vst world make it vintage?):hihi: .
This was recorded and mainly mixed on his studio computer, and the individual project tracks eventually got lost/deleted, so the main guitars/bass/drums and some synths are not fixable now. The tracks has gone through a few additions and "Mastering/finalizing" incarnations, and frankly we did not know too much about mixing 5 years ago. So most of the song is as is from that period. I recently did a re-master if you can call it that, to try and fix certain problems. I think it is now presentable to the music cafe. I tried to polish a turd the best I could
original Equipement used:
'81 Gibson Les Paul Custom tobacco burst with Seymour Duncan pickups and coil tap option
'93 Gibson Les Paul Standard with it's default humbuckers
Bass was either a Cort or higher end Ibanez, maybe something else, but it had really punchy tone. It was black, that's all I can really remember
rack of Behringer "tube" rack preamp, EQ, Compressor, Stereo Widener,into M-Audio 2496 soundcard. Also used my M-Audio Mobile Pre USB.
Guitar Rig 1
Drums on Demand loops
various indian percussion/tabla loops/field recordings
E-MU X-Board 49 midi controller (all parts played, I can't program to save my life)
Soundfonts (sitar, eastern stringed instruments)
Gunnar's Minimouge vsti
Crystal vsti
Synth1
one of the free mellotron vsti
Ariesverb or another free reverb, possibly Ambience
