Jamming Notes

I sat at my electric piano. Not a digital piano, but the real thing: with real hammers striking little tines, amplified and processed through pedals, much like an electric guitar. What came out was dark. Immediately dark. I blamed it on the mood around us these days. It is hard to compose something joyful when the whole world feels depressed.

A couple of tracks were laid down. At that stage, you would not have recognized the sound of my electric piano: it had been distorted through analog tape echoes, real analog tapes too, with the distortion and noise feeding on themselves and slowly building up. Check out the preset named Tape Echoes. Noisy and distorted, like the world around us. The sound itself was haunting. The audio engineer in me could hear its sonic qualities. But what it carried felt heavy.

So I took the challenge: not to erase it, but change direction by building on top of it something different. The next tracks were the breakbeat and a bass line. And suddenly, something shifted. As I was playing the bass, I felt like I was walking along a road. Walking straight, at a steady pace, walking as if I had stopped caring about my surroundings. I liked that: walking through the noise and distortion. Not escaping. Just... walking through.

And when I added the electric piano on top, playing without effects this time, it gave the piece a sense of hovering just above the darkness of the initial tracks. Floating over all of it. And, unexpectedly, I felt happy ;-)

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