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 Back To Ampersand Index PAGE 8 - The Tundra (Track 2) - After I had all of the other pieces written for the album, I decided to add this one. I've always had a strong interest in pieces written with an incredibly simple form that leave the players with very little to worry about other than expressing themselves. The actual written composition for this piece consists of the 2 bar bass ostinato and the written melody played twice by the guitar. I first recorded the bass part for the entire composition, tediously counting out the number of measures for each solo section and consciously minding the dynamic macro-contour of the whole piece. The bass I used is the first electric instrument I ever owned, a red 1964 Teisco NB-4 that a close family friend gave me, that I keep fitted with flatwound strings. (While I actually originally wanted to be a bassist, my family and friends discouraged me from pursuing it and told me to become a guitarist instead. It would be a number of years before I'd actually start playing bass again.)  The Teisco Bass, live with Paul Wertico Trio in September 2004, right around when I recorded the bass parts for Ampersand. With the unaccompanied bass part down, I then played the guitar solo over it before beginning the long process of writing an arrangement around the solo. This was actually a lot of fun because it gave me the opportunity to compliment my solo in the same way that scoring a movie allows you to compliment the dialogue track and picture. Here is a version of the isolated guitar, drums, and bass without that arrangement: tundra_trio1.mp3 The beginning of the track starts with a Mellotron guitar sound behind Paul's drum fill that is playing a three note figure found throughout the piece. Immediately afterwards, one of the "broken synth" sounds I created enters to play a sort of introductory melody before fading down and creating a dirty sounding ambience for the rest of the track. You can hear it here: tundra_wcmelody1.mp3 The arrangement behind the solo consists of a handful of orchestral sounds, mellotron sounds, and synthesizer sounds. There are two distinct 64 bar solo sections, both of which employ very different combinations of sounds. The first, starting at 1:09, contains a short repeating 4 bar pattern in the Mellotron Brass underneath long soaring guitar notes with long background tones from the woodwinds that creates a very interesting overlapping voice leading that follows no repeating pattern. Paul juxtaposes this by playing a very steady drumbeat. The second 64 bar section, starting at 3:11, introduces the Chamberlin string section playing a 16 bar pattern 4 times, while the guitar and drums begin playing much shorter and "free" notes over it. Here is an isolated version of just the background arrangement of the piece: tundra_arrangement1.mp3 One of the last things I added to the arrangement was the playfully interacting harp and celesta, which first enter at 0:28: tundra_harpcelesta1.mp3 At 0:54, a voice recording enters of my friend, Chris Stiles, from the band Vampire For Hire. For a while, I would carry around a small MP3 recorder and randomly record things whenever I was sitting places for a long period of time. This recording of Chris was made in 2004 while at his house with Jeff Kranz from The Opposition and Nisha Chawla from Mosaic. At 3:11, recordings of the Mellotron MKII "Cha Cha: Swinging Flutes" fills enter. When played by themselves, you can sort of guess the context from which they originally came: tundra_chachaflutes1.mp3 At 5:43, there is a 16 bar "cool off" before a 24 bar quiet resurgence begins at 6:14 that is based off of the low brass figure from the first 64 bar solo section. The epilogue of this piece begins at 7:00 where a choir of 6 theremin (two separate three part arrangements being played at once) enter to create a very eerie and confusing atmosphere. You can hear an isolated version of this at the end of tundra_arrangement1.mp3, included earlier. Chris Stile's voice returns here. He's actually talking about an episode of Family Ties, but out of context it sounded really serious. You'd be very surprised out of an average 2 hour conversation, how little of what is ever said could possibly be construed as a "serious" topic. At 8:10 begins the intro for the next track, November Frontlines. I decided to put the index marker right at the beginning of the form instead of here, for pacing reasons. You can hear a muffled version of the voice which will later return in Dead Pixels, as well as the distorted backwards acoustic guitar from The Park. Here's a January 7, 2005 version of the tune. It has a lot more focus on some very annoying analog synth sounds (I was trying to make a patch that sounded like an EML Electrocomp 101) and the Mellotron brass instead of sampled orchestral instruments: tundra_archive1.mp3 Back To Index |