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This piece is certainly a divergence from the kind of music I normally create, and also, it came to exist in most of it's finished form in an extraordinarily short time. For me personally, going through the process of composing a piece of music, recording, and finally finishing that piece usually takes days, weeks, months and sometimes even years. So, for this piece (titled "Spirit Song") to literally happen overnight was one of those rare events. How did this happen? Without getting into the details of what led me there, I found myself one evening in a small "New Age" shop listening to the amazing sound of one extremely large drum purportedly handmade by Native Americans out West. It was essentially hearing this extraordinary big complex drum sound that inspired me to do something creative. Little did I know at this point that I would be spending the rest of that night working on a new musical creation!
When I got back home it was already perhaps 11pm, but I already had ideas racing through my mind and I went immediately to my studio to get started. I searched all my sampled drum sounds and found a few that were as close to the original sound of THE drum. I tweaked these few choice sampled sounds by lowering the pitch, thereby slowing down the drumhead vibration and getting much closer to THE sound as I remembered it. Using MIDI technology, I then triggered out by hand what I thought of as the quintessential Native American beat. I recorded and layered several passes to create a loop from which the rest of the tune was built upon. The sound and the drum loop was sounding really nice at this point which really fired me up! I spent the rest of the night creating and recording layers of mostly very simple elemental melodic ideas (based on pentatonic scales) that all seem to work together harmoniously and rhythmically.
I probably never second guessed any musical thought that came to my mind. I went with the flow, so to speak, and kept on building upon the tune, finally finishing it off with some melodic solos. Since all the sounds (except for the vocalizations added later) were derived from synthesizers the final mixing was exceptionally easy and I had the basic instrumental version of "Spirit Song" finished as the sun was rising the next morning! I felt it unnecessary to add guitar parts of any kind. But I did feel one final element, vocals of some sort, was needed to round out the tune.
The process of adding vocalizations took several months more because I needed to do some research to find the right "words" to add as a final element to the track. I felt even from the inception, that "Spirit Song" had a decidedly Native American sound and spirit to it. But what do I really know about that subject? Actually, to be more precise, it is simply my Americanized new-age style creation somehow, indirectly interpreting the Native American spirit. Never the less, I thought that I could somehow find meaningful Native American words of some kind, preferably in a chant like form, that I could adapt and add to finish "Spirit Song". This idea was not good. I learned that authentic Native American songs, hymns, chants, narratives, etc. are all held sacred to the source. It is considered very disrespectful for anyone other than the source (the individual Native American tribe or nation) to attempt to repeat their songs and hymns. So with due respect, I decided to simply create my own "language" to become the words to be added to the track. It's almost like gibberish, except that I created repetitive vocalized phrases to give the impression of a chant taken from a real language. It is left to the listener to interpret the words in any way they want. Also, the howling wind sounds in the beginning of the track where all vocalized. Thanks to Dave Dale and Hilary Peirce for their vocal work.
oom ba high
yah high yah dome bah
oom ba high yah
yah dome bah aye yah
Thanks for checking it out, Audric
aujan copyright 2010
