Home - An Epilogue

This piece was created in an entirely different way to all of the other piece in the 'At Home' album. I often listen to quiet background ambient music as a source of relaxation and focus to work with, as I find the non-descriptive and passive nature helps to create an ideal environment for concentration or rest.

A particularly common time for me to listen to this genre of music is when meditating. I rarely engage in active listening process when listening to this music, it is more of a decoration to my environment, helping to disguise some of the silence or general city hubbub. Attempting to create ambient music with just the bass guitar had been a thought of challenge may times in the past but not yet something I had ventured to attempt. This felt like a good time to try. After a particularly restful meditation session, I felt inspired to record something in that restful space. Thus, this piece ended up being created and completed within 5 hours. This as a creative experience was for me, unique. The decision making process was rather limited, far more so than usual. In fact there were very few conscious decisions made. Instead, they were natural occurrences and organic developments of what had just been recorded. There was no overall plan, direction, nor a particular musical idea. I had no clue how this piece was going to pan out. Usually in my writing I have some sort of partial or complete sound in my mind that I attempt to recreate or 'transcribe', but this piece had neither.

The only conscious decisions were of a problem solving nature. Attempting to work out the best way to record the false harmonics to create the arpeggiated chords (ascending in 5ths) at 1:58. These required some thought to work out which string, which option of false harmonic would get the best resonance. Especially the final (Eb), which was close to the highest pitch I could cleanly express on this bass. The bass used was my Overwater Custom Progress 3 (6-string). It just so happened to be the bass that was next to my work station at the time I created a new blank project, and so, it was the bass I picked up to use.

One of my favourite plugins for logic are those made by Valhalla. The Shimmer, and Vintage Verb. These I opened immediately on various tracks as I knew they would be integral in creating a wide, washy, spacious sound.

Each of these plugins were integral to the flow and development of the ideas. I used presets, with only minor tweaks in mix density and feedback rate. I was conscious of spending time bogged down in the nitty gritty of finding something 'perfect' and wanted to maintain the flow. It is fair to say, these plugins absolutely dictated the musical ideas that came up.

The first idea that arose was the main bass part that begins the track. Root, 5th, 9th. once the chord was established the sound generated by the reverb wanted the chord to have space to ring out. Following this it felt natural to have some false and harp harmonics as they last and grow and literally 'shimmer' through the Shimmer plugin. This idea of having harmonics ringing though a dense reverb is quite well ingrained now from my use of them in other tracks Gerry Commane's, Beoga, Watermans pt 1, and Mr & Mrs*. (*Note - some of these piece are still in development)

I next felt I needed some sort of melody. Something benign, soft and unimposing. The harmonics recorded in 4ths in an almost doorbell-like fashion were the launching off point for the main melody.

I remembered at one point that a number of months ago, on a whim, I had purchased an eBow. Having never really experimented with it apart from when first unboxing it, this seemed like a perfect opportunity to test it out and create long dynamic and sustained melodic lines from the bass guitar. Crossing a number of these lines over made for some interesting moments when used in conjunction with the Valhalla plugins.

I named this piece 'Home' I think for a number of reasons. Firstly and perhaps most cheaply unoriginal is the two notes in 4ths sounding doorbell-like. However there are deeper reasons. Secondly, the serene no-conflict and organic experience of how this piece came to be reflected how I felt at the time; i.e peaceful, restful, and comfortable enough to express the ideas that arose. Home is one of the few places we tend to feel we can do this, and in a way, it felt right, it felt homely. Thirdly, the album I am creating has already been decided to be named 'At Home' (or something similar) due to the story around attempting to collaborate with musicians, stay creative, make music during a global pandemic. A time when the very definition of home is changing on a societal level. The comfort and respite from the world that home once represented has changed, for many for the worse- home is now a prison. One of the concepts of the album is to express that which is hoping to find what home still means, and to learn to be able to express musical ideas of technical and creative self-challenge within that changing paradigm. Its representative of an attempt to hold on to the refuge that home should be. With that in mind, and how this piece came to be created, it seemed a fortuitous and fitting way to close the album. Having found a sense of home again. 'Home' is an epilogue for the rather challenging creative journey creating this album has been through a challenging societal time.

Posted In: Reflections on Practice

Tagged: Bass, Solo, Home Practice, Second Circle

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