Elevon

With this post I was planning to go over one or two of my early efforts and explain how I got going on this music thing. But I just posted a new one to archive.org, Elevon, and thought I'd talk about that since it was fresh in my mind.

Setting out with Elevon, I was looking for a quieter, minimalist sound. But it does reflect my basic MO -- dink around with a couple of chords or a scale with various instruments until something starts to work. In this case I was drawn to E-flat and F elevenths (hence the name, Elevon, which is actually an airplane part). I found a nice bass sound/riff at pretty slow tempo (78 bpm) and worked up a drum part.

Then fishing around for melodic instruments, I tried this software recorder. I liked the woody tone and the sustained line I came up with in the middle of the chords but it wasn't working as a lead instrument. I had just picked up Apple's Symphony Orchestra Jam Pack which came with a software Steinway. I tried that and, boy, I liked the tone. So combined the notes of the two chords into a scale and started playing up and down on it against the bass/drum rhythm. For whatever reason, it just wasn't sounding right.

A couple nights later, I'd had a little wine and was feeling a little melancholy. So I sat down to the keyboard and hit record. The lead solo just came out, nothing fancy but it worked in my estimation. So I built the song around that. I worked hard to give the drums a natural feel so it didn't sound too loopy.

Then I thought, how about a key change. So I worked up a funky bass line using C-sharp and B elevenths and a piano riff using a portion of the chords. My idea was to have the recorder blow a solo over that. Try as I might, over several nights, and with help from my friend Greg, a real keyboard player, I couldn't make it work. We tried to replace the recorder with a cello. Greg laid down some nice lines (he thought the piano solo needed a melodic counter point), but nothing really sat well with me. (I concluded the piano solo had to stand on its own otherwise it's flavor was lost.)

Anyway, I ended up using the recorder riff I started out with, just adjusted to the new chords. The end of Elevon sounds a little smooth-jazzish. This struck me as a good time to fade it out.

Mixing the song, I didn't have to do much. I had to separate out the kick drum and turn it down because it was too strong. I used some EQ on the bass to tone down the low end which was making the song a little muddy. I added a touch of reverb to the instruments (very little to the piano) and bounced to AIFF.