Cilikis4 - Songwriting with an electric kit!
February 25, 2023
Well this is a new!! Normally when we write music or rehearse, we do so by making a hell of a racket at Rock City Studios in Upper Coomera for about a year which eventually leads to an album of music to be recorded. But this time, the writing process is much different. Our drummer Ty is using an electric drum kit and we are using our practice amps to handle the writing. I'm using a Fender FM65r solid state amp (12inch speaker) while Frank is using his Spark amp for bass work. Once we have all the tracks written and pre-prod work done, we will all trundle off to Rock City or even the Belmont Basement to rehearse the material at stage volume and tweak and change it from there until its ready to be recorded!
Already we have noticed a remarkable difference in performance. The electric kit obviously behaves way different to an acoustic kit so Ty is tweaking the kits parameters like curve and thresholds etc.. The performing using quieter amps requires a cleaner performance for myself and Franks bass, even playing old songs that we only played a month ago with no real issues, playing them much quieter proved to be quite the challenge!
Here's some photos and video of last nights quiet writing session and rehearsals. Note how we cocked up the song Station 13 as we've never played it this way before!
It is insane the way the mind works by telling you "hang on! this is not right, why is the volume so low?" as you proceed to forget how everything seems to go! hah! Sorry for the low quality video, something went funny with the camera focus for some reason, it gets a little better in the middle!
I know it sounds loud in the video but in the room is was no louder than 90db! Normally our rehearsals are about 110 to 118 dB in volume! So this is really different for us and going to take some getting used to that's for sure!
Anomaly Production Trivia #4 - Writing Singularity - Part One
January 29, 2023
Track three from the album Anomaly is Singularity. Its original name was called, Quad. If you read on, you will find out why this is the case.
We do not use a typical verse chorus style of song writing. This presents a challenge as to how to write interesting instrumental music that doesn't sound like other writers. As a part of the writing process for this collection of instrumental tracks, one of the important factors in the writing was to maintain a level of restriction on musical content selection; ie in the track called quad, the primary rule was to restrict the number of music notes or chords / scale notes to FOUR, hence the name QUAD.
The song opens with a passage in a 5/4 time signature and four basic two note chords: E5, Esus2, Eminor and EmMaj7
The idea was to create a melodic structure using these four chords and the notes in them without any deviation unless there was a section change coming up (which you can hear at 2m 48s where an additional A minor chord was included). This restriction was encouraged to try and see how we could come up with something with a given set of parameters. We generally write music this way because it seems to force us to be more creative with what we have on hand.
The intro and main theme of Singularity goes on till about 1m 18s where a key change occurs and the next set of note restriction occurs; this melodic structure continues to 1m 42s where it returns to the main theme.
Four random notes were selected to create a structure from without any deviation. The notes selected for this are Ab, C, D and B and we were to create a section of music that fit within this range of notes in a series of arpeggios:
You will notice that these three sections of arpeggios are the same but just inversions of the first arpeggio; even though they are the same series of notes; for this section you will notice that no matter what is played, it is a variation of these four notes in some way. A future YouTube video will show more on this.
Working on the fourth installment
January 29, 2023
Hi everyone, here is just a quick update; the band is currently in the process of working on new material for our fourth album! In between work, family and life and being quite rusty as a band (a few years off doesnt help) we are managing to squeeze in a some writing sessions and rehearsals. We have been looking at a new live set list as well which will include some numbers we don't normally play live like, Wavelength and Falkens Maze for example along with some tracks from Anomaly like Transverse, Anomaly and Ion as we intend to do some live performances where we can while working on the new stuff. It was great yesterday to crank out Falkens Maze in what seems almost a decade since we ever played it together. The song is an over eight minute long epic that doesnt get much love to play live but we most definitely bring it back for some new shows in the future along with Wavelength. But in the meantime we have an album to write \m/\m/
Here's some photos of the current rehearsals over the last six months but man do we have a LONG way to go!
