encouraged by the surprise of and the success of “beyond the pale”, I decided immediately to have a go at another, more intentionally created rock song – so this was the more considered piece, where I was deliberately (rather than, almost accidentally, as happened with “beyond the pale”) trying to create an active track, with a great bass and drum basis, and interesting guitars on top.
I think in some ways, as pleased as I was with “beyond the pale”, that I am even more pleased with “global cooling”; it somehow seems even more remarkable – especially as it was put together very quickly indeed, I very confidently drew together samples that I felt would work together well – pushed the “play” button – and that was that.
“global cooling” has at it’s heart, a very, very cool bass line, which is prominent throughout, which actually sort of “leads” the drums and percussion – the drum part is three measures of beat, followed by one measure of bass drum – and this was a bit of an advance for me, but I am starting to “get it” – be a bit more savvy about how you can break things up in a track like this, and adding in that measure of bass drum made a huge difference to the way this track sounds.
The bass part is also “broken up” – two bars of the main bass line, one bar of an alternate bass that includes a wonderful pad synth, and then one bar of the main bass line – so every third bar is an alternate.
the addition of four straight measures of ride cymbal, and two measures of hi-hat (with rests in the other two measures – so, hi-hat, rest, hi-hat, rest…) shores up the drums, adding some percussive support; meanwhile…
with my bold, repeating bass guitar part leading my “three of one and one of another” drum part along the way, all I had to do then was find guitar parts that worked, but didn’t overwhelm – and again, I looked to one of my favourite paks, the”ambient 100c” pak, for some beautiful “harmonics” guitars that I've used before in earlier tracks.
a set of stereo guitars then, one panned hard left, the other, hard right, with the following pattern: guitar 1, guitar 2, guitar 2, guitar 1 – which ends up nicely symmetrical as two bars of guitar and two bars of guitar 2, only, split oddly…
various supporting, ambient voices added in as hopefully nearly-invisible musical glue included the “ems saw windverb”, a “chorused organ” and the mysterious “siren song-ks” – all adding their own small bit of ambient mystique to the track – repeating a success that I had just learned in the creation of “beyond the pale” – having a few ambient elements floating over the top of an active piece, works in a not-dissimilar way to robert fripp floating soundscapes over the top of king crimson when they are bashing away in full prog rock flight.
when I read back through this description, I realise that there is very little about this track that just remains constant or “loops”, and in fact, I have a fairly complex situation, where the drums, the bass, and the guitars all have variant measures to make sure that the content doesn't get too “samey”.
I did this almost unconsciously, as if having four bars of the same thing was a bad idea (it isn't and in fact, the cymbals are indeed, four straight bars – so sometimes, that’s the way to go) and somehow, instinctively, I knew this needed to be done to provide sufficient musical variety, to keep the piece changing, and interesting – and I really love the way this piece grabs you by the lapels from the very start, with that wonderful bass line, and carries you all the way through to the end.
ambient loop guitarist dave stafford performed on stage with robert fripp and the orchestra of crafty guitarists in early
2009, and again with robert fripp and the symphony of crafty guitarists in 2015, and has worked with ambient music and looping for over twenty years. stafford has a rich back catalogue of ambient and loop music, +rock, prog or acoustic crafty guitar music: www.pureambient.com...more
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