the musical experiments

Here are some songs I have been working on over the last year or so.

This is an unfinished song I am working on with a strange time signature; bars of 5, 5, 5 & 6 beats add up to 21, so it also makes three bars of 7, which is the rhythm of the ‘john’ vocal, loosely anyhow.

I composed this song as part of my Sanskrit studies, after we studied Abhijñānashākuntala. The kids helped me here. It is a bit of a rag tag effort.

This is one of the more wistful sounding songs I’m working on.

Covers:

Singing this, I was struck by the depth and beauty of Cohen’s lyrics. It’s incredible stuff, I have a lot of Cohen’s poetry, but I think his lyrical strength really lies with his songs. My fingerstyle guitar on this track is a bit brutal, and not quite accurate to the original. The picture here shows part of my set up in the studio as I was recording.

I couldn’t quite get the high notes on Pink Moon, and I changed the arrangement around a little, putting the piano at the end. Such a strange, haunting song, from Drake’s last album. It is always interesting to play with Drake’s unusual tunings, but it means that you can’t just pick up any old guitar and play a Drake song without remembering what all the strings are supposed to be doing.

Some more of my song experiments are on soundcloud. As I get my garage studio together I am finding it easier to make reasonable recordings for uploading. A lot of these I hope to improve on as I get better with the technology.

This was my studio a few months ago, it is already much improved!