All That There Is

An acoustic waltz festooned with electropop arpeggios.

This is a small instrumental I wrote a very long time ago, at the time of my graduation from the religious school I attended for 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. It had words, but due to their teenage quality I am suppressing them in favor of this executive summary:

“Well, here we are, you and I. For years we were taught there was a god to protect us, but we know all we’ve really got is one another and now we can stop pretending. We are all that there is. I’ll believe in you if you believe in me.”

Laid out in Band-in-a-Box and finished up in Logic Pro. In the end we wind up with:

~364:Guitar, Acoustic, Fingerpicking Ev 065
~368:Guitar, Acoustic, Strumming Ev 065

electric piano
horn section
recorder
trumpet
organ
violin

Content Rating: Benign/Quirky

Playing Time: 2:42

Wow!
This is something completely different.
Very cool music!

Rob and Anne-Marie

* curtsies *

EXCELLENT song

Its nice to hear more instrumentals

Super mix

Great dynamics

Two thumbs up

Thanks, Mario. And a hearty yo ho ho for more instrumentals.

Sometimes I feel like I'm at a starting disadvantage, being (with rare exceptions) a maker of instrumental music.

But then I think: "Hey, a singer is stuck with the voice they have, all the time, on everything they do, which places a huge burden on the lyrical and emotional content of their music. Plus they have to carve out a space in the mix and make sure their voice stands out against everything else, no matter how interesting the other stuff is. With an instrumental, however, you can go nutz and play with the whole range of tone colors available and 'sing' with a different voice in every verse."

So, again, yo ho ho for instrumentals and thanks for hear + speak. =8^)

Hi Mark,

You sure know how to surprise me with your creations!
It's a wonderful melody, with a climbing harshness towards the end.
Don't know if it was the electric piano and the guitar together, but that gave the song a nice twist.

Enjoyed it!
Hans

Thanks, Hans, very glad you liked. I'm an old dog learning new tricks, working with ancient sheet music I carefully wrote out in 197* (the corner of the page is missing, I think it was 1974 but it could have been even earlier). I see that even back then I was intrigued by diminished chords, which are very audible here with all the arpeggiated hokey-pokey. Again, thank you.

This is a nice sounding piece with a cool 6/8 feel... I like the arrangement and instrumentation.

Thanks, BH. =8^)

I like the message!

Quite a unique sound.

moto

Very cool!

It starts out sounding like something from medieval times and then with the arpeggios moves into a a time far, far into the future.

For me (Janice) this is a very visual song and I imagined I was on a merry-go-round inside of a kaleidoscope.

We don't have a clue as to how you produced all those tracks other than the RT's but let a big ole "well done" suffice.

We enjoyed this!

J&B

Thanks, folks.

By no coincidence the lead virtual instrument here is actually called "Medieval Recorder" in Logic, which is odd since recorders are still around today in the exact same form. I guess they want to distinguish the musical instrument from the kind of recorder that records.

Janice, your description of the merry-go-round / kaledioscope sounds like a fairy trap out of a Thomas Disch novel (he wrote about a world in which fairies fly around making nuisances of themselves, so people build fancy visual machines as defenses; the fairies stop to look and can never look away.) I'm happy to conjure an image like that! =8^)

PS – Attached is a picture of my arpegiattor (his name is "Arpegiattor"). Put two of these together and that's all that there is to it!

Mark,

Really well done and a very creative arrangement . . . had me listening to the end, wondering where it might go next . . . it didn’t disappoint. Good stuff!

All my best to you,

Deej

Hi Mark,

I love waltzes and I love waltzes that travel along with the feel of 6/8. So from bar 1, you had me (with two boxes of likeability ticked).

This is a greatly inventive arrangement. It's mesmerizing how you move from and older sound into the world of distorted guitars.

My right foot didn't stop tapping from start to end.

A terrific listen.

--Noel

So glad you dug it, thank you for listening!

Believe it or not, a version I recorded in 1986 sounds almost identical, except here I'm playing actual guitars and recorders, the arpeggio being supplied by an MC-202 MicroComposer:

https://soundcloud.com/mark_hayes/all-that-there-is-20th-century-version

Hi Mark,

it's a very melodic and soft instrumental composition. I appreciated.

Kindly regard
Derochette
alias JaniJackFlash

Very pretty tune. Loved the melody. Got a Celtic vibe.

Beautiful folk melody and very nice chord progression. I like the doubled recorder. Those arpeggios work really well, somehow reminds me of music in the computer games I used to play in the 80's with my Commodore 64 or those songs I made with it You should work on the lyrics, the summary is very promising

Janne

Thanks, all. It's really nice to see people liking this old thing after all this time.

FYI, here's the MicroComposer that did those arps back in the day.

Nice!

Back in the day I desperately wanted an arpeggiator, as I was - and still am - a fairly mediocre keyboard player, and they seemed like a whole lot of fun.

Which is exactly the sort of sound it lends here.

Plus, waltzes are fun to listen to.

I can commiserate with you about instrumentals. I always feel a bit guilty when I write one, thinking I really should be working on lyrics. But I don't really feel that way when I listen to other people's instrumentals, oddly enough.

So well crafted and presented, Mark. The teenage you was also a fine writer. Very good melody.

Thanks! For the record, the melody starts on the D in a Cadd9 chord, which is fairly odd, but it seems to work. I guess it was teenage rebellion trying to be arty.