"She Looked Back" (instrumental)
1 of 7 - Tangled Roots Project
I plan to share all 7 tracks and welcome any feedback!
Lead Guitar (clean): 511: Guitar, Electric, Soloist Dire Ev 140 (Darin Favorite)
Lead Guitar (efx): 1530: Guitar, Electric, Soloist PopPower Ev 120 (Dave Cleveland)
Rhythm Guitar: 1099: Guitar, Electric, Rhythm JazzSwingFreeComp Sw 110 (Oliver Gannon)
Electric Piano: 1772: Piano, Electric, Rhythm JazzFunkMovin Ev16 130 (Jeff Lorber)
Flute: 704: Flute, Soloist Bossa Ev 140 (P.J. Perry)
Electric Bass: 1769: Bass, Fretless Electric, JazzFunkMovin Ev16 130 (Alex Al)
Drums & percussion: Mino Cinelu (courtesy of Loop Loft)
Additional Percussion, Keyboards, Composition & Arrangement: MW Gilbert
https://soundcloud.com/mwgilbert/tangled-roots-ep-01-she-looked-backHere's some background; I'll post this once and link back with other tracks.
Tangled Roots Project: I grew up listening to all kinds of American music, jazz, blues, rock, folk, bluegrass, R&B. When I started composing my own music, even though these many wonderful influences were shaping my compositions, I never worked directly in these idioms. Since my own music is a coming together of many tangled roots, I wanted to step outside my comfort zone and try to write pieces that went back to this rich pool of musical influences.
The initial step of each piece was the entering of the music/changes (first worked out and hand-written) into the BiaB lead sheet view. As the instrumentation and the arrangement (in this case which instruments play in which bars) were also already worked out, these details were entered in the (mute/back to normal) dialogs for each relevant bar. After, there was a long time spent ‘auditioning’ RealTracks for each instrumental part. I ran three takes of each chosen part, exporting individual tracks as clean audio; each instrumental part had three audio stems.
The stems were then imported into Pro Tools. The big task was editing each part, picking excerpts, bars, or phrases from each of the takes to create a hopefully coherent part for each instrument. This was done in an order allowing for some perceived virtual ‘interaction’ between instruments; a part being worked on could be edited to respond to an already completed part.
Once the performances were set, in some cases I added additional parts, either live or sampled percussion/loops, or some other instrumentation or doublings. In one case I did not use the RealDrums part I started with, constructing a new drum & percussion part from samples and loops.
Finally, the pieces were mixed in Logic Pro X using my usual array of plugins and techniques, and then mastered by Tom Waltz (
http://waltzmastering.com) in Boston, who had just done a phenomenal job on my most recent album release (Secret Stories
http://www.mwgilbert.com/recordings.html) .
While some things were done a little bit differently from piece to piece, the process overall was about the same for all of them. I invite anyone who thinks that this process has “the computer just writing all the music”, or thinks this will not be an incredibly time-consuming amount of work, to try it for themselves! Band in a Box is a very interesting tool, especially given the overall incredible quality of the RealTrack performances. Making these into real music takes a lot of work and artistic choice, but is well worth it. It became a challenge to myself to produce finished tracks that would honestly represent my musical intentions. It felt like the role of a producer working with session musicians and then slowly crafting the results into the final product. I hope you find that the results fit together as a project, and stand alone as representative of related but distinct genres.
- MW Gilbert
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