The lesser mabinogion

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Ok, this idea came to me over the weekend as a way of working on my musical creativity.
The idea is this – Every Tuesday, I have three hours in which to write, record, and produce a piece of music from scratch.
It doesn’t matter how short or long, how good or bad, as long as I do it.
Then I post it here for the world to hear.

My first attempt, can be heard here (3.27Mb).

It actually took me about 3 hours and 45 minutes – I spent too much time messing around trying to get decent lead parts from the guitar. (And ended up making do with the crap you can hear in it).
Overall I’m rather pleased with it – it’s pretty rough, but I’ve shown myself that the concept will work.
The flute needs a bit more work- a few more times going over it would have solidified what I was doing in the intro a bit better, and the tuning and intonation’s not all that great either, but considering that my total flute experience numbers in the hours rather than years, I’m not too unhappy with it.
The reverb I’m using for it is all wrong too – but it’ll do.
The guitar solos are both pretty much a mess – there’s nothing original in them, they’re just my standard sort of stuff, and not even executed very well – it’s painfully obvious that I run out of ideas near the end of the second one. I really need to do some more work on my solo technique and get some new tricks, because I can tell that my soloing will get old very quick at the moment.
There’s quite a few other things in it that I would have tidied up given more time – the drums are pretty much copy and paste stuff throughout the bulk of it, and the result of a single take + quantize for the rest, so there’s plenty of room for me to do more there.
The orchestral parts turned out amazingly well considering how little time I spent on them. I’m the sort of person who’ll happily spend 6 hours just tweaking four bars worth of violin part to make it sound authentic, so “one take, hit quantize, that’ll do!” is fairly alien for me.

So, that’s all for now, I’ll have another one next Tuesday. (And don’t worry, they’re not all going to be metal – I want to experiment as much as possible in the process)