Note: This post was written in 2025 and backdated to appear on the day I wrote and published the track.
If you’ve read my posts from past years, you know that I love writing waltzes. They’re fun and relaxing exercises. With few exceptions, though, I write them for either piano, a string quartet, or an orchestra. I rarely come to them with a melody in mind, but that’s one of the reasons I think I like writing them. As soon as I decide I’m writing a waltz, a melody appears. The rest is often just figuring out what else goes around it.
- Demitasse Ray Toler 2:26
I don’t have a strong memory of what sparked this one, but looking back through the cotton gauze, I’m pretty sure it was a combination of it getting late in the day and needing something I knew I could knock out quickly, along with having found this lovely Harmochord instrument.
The Harmochord is sort of the bastard child of an electric accordion that slept with a harmonica. Rather than having a bellows, there’s an electric air pump. When you depress a key (or one of the left-hand chord buttons), the air passes over the appropriate reed. It’s the same principle as a pipe organ.
My family actually had one of these types of instruments for awhile when I was in high school. I remember all of the crazy clicking that goes on when you open the air vents, the vague wheezing sound when the pump starts up… it didn’t seem all that important at the time, but I definitely remember the experience.
For that reason, when I started playing this sound from the excellent Spectrasonics Keyscape library, all of it came up from the deep vaults of memory. I could even smell that musty scent that disappated after the pump had been running for a few minutes.
I like that they captured all of the key clicks, pump noise, and valves. The timing is also a little wonky at times, but I’m not entirely sure if that’s the nature of the samples or just sloppy playing on my part.
The sound, though. Ah, the sound took me to some cheesy movie shot in a Parisian sidewalk cafe. Every stereotype you can think of is there: the espresso sipping snob, the beret wearing mime, the disheveled artist painting the river, the waiter rolling his eyes at the tourists and, of course, the busker with a squeezebox and a hat with a few seed coins tossed in.
This one is a fun little folly, and I like when it lands in the shuffle.
Colophon
Instruments & Samples
Keyscape
Effects, Mixing, & Mastering
FabFilter, Gullfoss, MOTU ProVerb