Last weekend I released an album! Unlike most of the posts I make here, this music is not related to the organ, improvisation, or any kind of choral music. This is not outside of my ballpark per se, but rather something I have wanted to indulge in for some time. The basic premise of the album, from my perspective, is an etude, a study work to teach myself several DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) plugins. The plugin limitations start with these instruments: HELM and two piano sounds, Addictive Keys Studio Grand and Spitfire Audio LABS Soft Piano. HELM was at the forefront of the project. The piano instruments were used generally by me as a tool for improvisation and I did a very small amount of quantizing to keep it feeling human (a.k.a. click tracks = metronomes). I also used Izotope’s Ozone 9 Elements on all of the tracks for LUFS (loudness unit full scale) and this really cool stereo imager thingy. I’ll get to the other three plugins when we get there.
Today I present one single track “Aria,” that sets the general tone of the whole work. I have said in this blog before that a piece of music, no matter what genre, geographic area, time period, etc., will tell you, the listener what is about to unfold in the broadest terms. This being an aria, I wanted it to be pretty and pleasing before it becomes something else. The progression is pretty simple, the meter is in nine, which makes for very un-square cycles, and only uses HELM. It’s all fairly straight forward!
[…] most obvious choice to me was to simply start messing with that circular progression used in the Aria. This is also the movement that introduces the use of the piano which was somewhat improvised. […]