Descent by Ascent
Descent will be the final track on the very-nearly-done Secrets of Flight CD. There are several other tracks you haven't heard yet, but we couldn't wait any longer to share this one with you. The unfinished songs are mostly vocals and acoustic guitar... Descent is a great big epic proggy mostly-instrumental multipart piece.... with a rap in the middle of it. If that's not your bag, turn back now!
Descent by Ascent Music Online
Descent is sort of a companion piece to Ascension, or maybe its evil twin... Or I guess you could say it further develops the ideas in Ascension and then departs from there. It also contains a few subtle and not-so-subtle references to a couple of the other songs on the CD, including What the Crows Know and Talking in Circles.
I actually set out to write and record something that would be just percussion and vocals. Since Christina and I have always had songs in our live set that are performed that way, I thought it would be good to have that style represented on the CD. I especially wanted to layer up percussion sounds played on my new Korg Wavedrum. As you can hear, that's not what I ended up with! I did record some layered-up drums, but it wasn't going anywhere for me. The drum parts were variations on a pattern: 4,3,2,1... dadadada, dadada, dada, da. That pattern is the only thing that survived from the original idea, and it occurs through the final piece.
Somehow the idea changed from a drum-and-vocal song to an instrumental continuation of Ascension. I'd had a lot of fun recording the ending section of that song, and I wanted to revisit that territory... not to reprise it, but to go further in that direction. To make it easy for me to get back there, I used the tracks from Ascension as a template (in Sonar), including all of the guitar, drum and keyboard sounds, along with their effects. In other words, all I needed to do was plug my guitar in or switch on my keyboard to get the same exact sounds. This is one of the many benefits to using "virtual" guitar amps and recording drums (played on the HandSonic) through MIDI. This meant that I was starting from the same sonic palette.
Of course I ended up adding even more sounds. There are 58 tracks! Nearly every gadget I have is incorporated in this song. There many,many different guitar sounds ( the short guitar solo at 3:41 was played through two different instances of Guitar Rig at the same time), and you'll hear a lot of layered eBow throughout. There many instances of synths, especially Cakewalk's Rapture. The echoing piano is processed through several guitar effects. As on all of the other songs on the Ascent CD, I played all the keyboard parts rather than programming them (which is a big step for me).
The section that first occurs at 1:37 was actually the original chorus to Ascension. It had lyrics at the time about "searching for truth"... When Christina and I were first practicing the song, that chorus really dragged it down. The 'searching' chorus was rejected in favor of the more upbeat 'a comet rages' chorus. Anyway, it works about a million times better in this context.
And so what about that rap section (2:26)... how did it get there? Well, somewhere around the time that I was thinking that this would all be a big drum solo, Christina commented (favorably) that we should certainly be highlighting all of our skills on the CD. Which brought up the point that Christina has skills (Skillz? Flava?) that we don't generally use. Since she grew up on Rap music (Yes, I know, it's called Hip Hop now, it was Rap then) in the 80s, she still has a (somewhat frightening) ability to do this. On occasion, she's woken up a sleepy Ascent audience by busting out a few rhymes...
It's not anything that I would have ever thought to do, but I was into the idea right away. I wrote the words that she's rapping, once again as an extension of the ideas in Ascension. The words are definitely not 'gangsta.' On the demo I recorded, I basically sound like Weird Al. I think my jaw actually dropped when we started recording, because Christina somehow made the whole thing real.... I think she was actually possessed during the recording session. Her version sounds more like Eminem's Latina sister! It's a nice contrast to the general pomposity of the rest of the piece.
Anyway, there's so much stuff in this recording that I could go on trying to explain it forever. So I won't. Listening back to it now, I'm proud of the big structure and the general sense of drama. I can definitely hear a big Pink Floyd / Yes / Genesis (Steve Hackett) influence happening, but I think there's more than that. I hope you will listen and let me know what you think.
Descent by Ascent Music Online
Descent is sort of a companion piece to Ascension, or maybe its evil twin... Or I guess you could say it further develops the ideas in Ascension and then departs from there. It also contains a few subtle and not-so-subtle references to a couple of the other songs on the CD, including What the Crows Know and Talking in Circles.
I actually set out to write and record something that would be just percussion and vocals. Since Christina and I have always had songs in our live set that are performed that way, I thought it would be good to have that style represented on the CD. I especially wanted to layer up percussion sounds played on my new Korg Wavedrum. As you can hear, that's not what I ended up with! I did record some layered-up drums, but it wasn't going anywhere for me. The drum parts were variations on a pattern: 4,3,2,1... dadadada, dadada, dada, da. That pattern is the only thing that survived from the original idea, and it occurs through the final piece.
Somehow the idea changed from a drum-and-vocal song to an instrumental continuation of Ascension. I'd had a lot of fun recording the ending section of that song, and I wanted to revisit that territory... not to reprise it, but to go further in that direction. To make it easy for me to get back there, I used the tracks from Ascension as a template (in Sonar), including all of the guitar, drum and keyboard sounds, along with their effects. In other words, all I needed to do was plug my guitar in or switch on my keyboard to get the same exact sounds. This is one of the many benefits to using "virtual" guitar amps and recording drums (played on the HandSonic) through MIDI. This meant that I was starting from the same sonic palette.
Of course I ended up adding even more sounds. There are 58 tracks! Nearly every gadget I have is incorporated in this song. There many,many different guitar sounds ( the short guitar solo at 3:41 was played through two different instances of Guitar Rig at the same time), and you'll hear a lot of layered eBow throughout. There many instances of synths, especially Cakewalk's Rapture. The echoing piano is processed through several guitar effects. As on all of the other songs on the Ascent CD, I played all the keyboard parts rather than programming them (which is a big step for me).
The section that first occurs at 1:37 was actually the original chorus to Ascension. It had lyrics at the time about "searching for truth"... When Christina and I were first practicing the song, that chorus really dragged it down. The 'searching' chorus was rejected in favor of the more upbeat 'a comet rages' chorus. Anyway, it works about a million times better in this context.
And so what about that rap section (2:26)... how did it get there? Well, somewhere around the time that I was thinking that this would all be a big drum solo, Christina commented (favorably) that we should certainly be highlighting all of our skills on the CD. Which brought up the point that Christina has skills (Skillz? Flava?) that we don't generally use. Since she grew up on Rap music (Yes, I know, it's called Hip Hop now, it was Rap then) in the 80s, she still has a (somewhat frightening) ability to do this. On occasion, she's woken up a sleepy Ascent audience by busting out a few rhymes...
It's not anything that I would have ever thought to do, but I was into the idea right away. I wrote the words that she's rapping, once again as an extension of the ideas in Ascension. The words are definitely not 'gangsta.' On the demo I recorded, I basically sound like Weird Al. I think my jaw actually dropped when we started recording, because Christina somehow made the whole thing real.... I think she was actually possessed during the recording session. Her version sounds more like Eminem's Latina sister! It's a nice contrast to the general pomposity of the rest of the piece.
Anyway, there's so much stuff in this recording that I could go on trying to explain it forever. So I won't. Listening back to it now, I'm proud of the big structure and the general sense of drama. I can definitely hear a big Pink Floyd / Yes / Genesis (Steve Hackett) influence happening, but I think there's more than that. I hope you will listen and let me know what you think.
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