New Song - When It's Right, It's Right

dcm_guitar

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Sep 13, 2016
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San Ramon, CA
What is this? Is it rock? Is it fusion? Is it some new form of metallic, new age acid jazz? Honestly, I don't know what the genre is. It's some form of rock, but beyond that......

https://soundcloud.com/radiomoved/when-its-right-its-right

Absurd details........

I took a few days off work. Since I'm not traveling anywhere I decided to work on a new piece of music. I had a 10 second riff that I wanted to work with and turn into a full song. I've been trying to get more fluid in working with modes and stupidly decided to concentrate on phrygian. Sigh.....

I laid down the foundational riff with the Hollowbody II. It's the guitar you first hear and did all of the rhythm work. It had the right level of airiness and darkness from the neck pickup. I actually used a cabinet emulation of a 1x12 for all of the guitar parts on this song. The 1x12 just had this roughness of tone that I liked....

After laying down the rhythm tracks, I worked on drums to get the guitar parts and the drums to fit together. I'm not a drummer, but I absolutely love working with EZ Drummer. That tool is simply amazing.

Now for the lead lines. All the lead parts are played on my 2408. The original arrangement simply had an A part and a B part. I created lead melodies for each part. The basic idea of the A section lead part fell right into place. I started working on the B section lead and ran into a problem. I knew what I wanted to play, but I was unable to play it.

Cue up three days of work with the metronome. I played this damn part over and over and over and over again. The song is recorded at 113 BPM. I started my practicing at 50 BPM on my metronome. I'm SO glad baseball is back because I was able to sit on the couch, watch the Cubs and do metronome work.

I eventually got the run of sextuplets up to speed and went back to recording. It took......let's just say a LOT of takes to get it laid down so I was happy. For those who care, I play this little run two times in the song. The first time is at 0:42 ad the second time is at 1:24. The run lasts 2 seconds. I practiced for a lot of hours over three days and then spent a lot of hours getting good enough takes for what amounts to 4 seconds of recorded music. Yikes!!! On the plus side, it's FREAKING FAST and sounds like Steve Lukather.

I had the song arranged as a simple A part and B part and I just ran through both sections 2x. It clocked in at about 1:40 at this point. I wasn't sure whether to say it was finished or add another part. Because I was on vacation from work and had just opened a bottle of scotch, I decided to add another part to the song.

Music theory warning.........

The first two sections are fast and frenetic, so I decided to make the new section slow. The first two sections are A phyrgian which is minor (with a flat 2). So I decided to put the new section in F major. Then, I decided to play with that flat 2 idea from the first two sections. So this new section is a simple two chord progression between Fmajor7 and Eminor9. The Eminor9 has an F# in it, so that kind of strange flat 2 tonality from the phyrgian section is mirrored in the C section as well.

I recorded the bass part last night, and mixed it today. I'm pretty happy with the bass line, and might go back into the mix to pull the bass forward a little bit....

Anyway, that's the story of writing, "When It's Right, It's Right". I REALLY hope it's worth 3:07 of your time.
 
yep just listened to it tow times through. really awesome riff to start with. Lead work was worth the time I think. Sounds great.
 
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