The Gathering

Wow. Full disclosure – I’m writing this entry on February 15 (and will be doing so for the next few). Mary was on business travel for a full seven days, so I’ve been taking care of our new puppy, Olive. She’s currently nine months old, and I’ll be writing about her more extensively in a later post, so just suffice to say that I’m behind on the blog. I’ve also given up on trying to also write entries for 2024… that will have to wait for March.

I really enjoyed writing Lights in the Mist and, after posting it, the mood carried over into this track. The moodiness and sense of place, in particular, are definitely a carryover, though my very first direction was going to be a bit more upbeat. The choir was the second thing I added and so I thought that things would end up being a little lighter. With each additional sound, though, I felt it had a weight that was more… not sinister, but serious.

Derek Greenberg¹I’ve written about Derek before, and he’s one of my favorite Song-A-Day artists said some really nice things about this piece, and he made it sound like I did a lot of this intentionally, but this was another “pants” track. In fact, this one was very nearly chucked out on multiple occasions because it just kept becoming a trainwreck. But it’s also a testament to slogging through, adding some clay here, some water there, until the sculpture finally emerges and looks like it was always meant to be that way.

Fake It ‘Till You Make It

First off, I played the main bits in freehand with no tempo, no click. I think I was either planning on fixing things if it ended up being decent, or just making it a completely rubato piece. I added the guitar-ish sound mostly to provide some percussive, sharp sounds, but it came with a delay that forced a rhythmic element and tempo on everything. Now I could have gotten rid of the delay, but I liked the way it sounded.

But… the delay is either triplets or dotted eight notes, and in the absence of anything else providing rhythm, those triplets change the entire thing into sounding like it’s in 3/4 or (probably more correctly 6/8. At this point, I tried to correct the other parts and get chords lined up with measures, but other than eliminating a couple of changes that just sounded wrong, I didn’t really do much.

When I decided to add the drums, I kept going with that 6/8 feel. It was a little odd playing that way with a 4/4 tempo click, but not difficult since the guitar was providing the reference. I recorded three segments with the drums to provide the initial pattern, an emotionally elevated pattern, and then the final climactic one. I worked backward from the end so the last two patterns would have four repetitions each and then, knowing that I would be fading the drums in from silence, copied the initial pattern back to about the mid-point of the track.

So if any musicologist from the future finds my project files and is trying to figure out what the hell I thought I was doing in all of this, the secret is that I wasn’t thinking at all. Sometimes you just keep pushing until things make sense.

I’m pleased with the result, and Derek’s nice comments led to me making another piece in the same style. As I said to him, I have this very vague feeling that Black Obelisk, The Sentinel, and this track are connected by a narrative, and I have some imagery in my head, but nothing concrete enough to saddle the listener with my interpretation of things. Derek’s encouragement led to me writing Convocation, which will show up after tomorrow’s track.

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Tal-Pha, LCO Textures, Choreographs, Omnisphere, Damage 2

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

FabFilter, Gullfoss, Portal, Valhalla Delay

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Notes

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  I’ve written about Derek before, and he’s one of my favorite Song-A-Day artists