Etching
Notes On "ETCHING"
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore 3, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional & Studio One 6 Professional (Final Mix)
Number of tracks: 42
Sound source: MuseScore 3 (Timbares Of Heaven), Presence XT, Impact XT, Sample One (All built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and Recording period: May 1 2022 - Aug 30 2022 (Final Mix: 2023 Jan 3 - 5)
(TM writes:)
"Minimal on Basso Continuo" with Guitars
The piece called "Etching" is supposed to be a bonus track for the "Auditory Art For Visual Arts" album. Surely, there sometimes exist "bonus tracks" in general but that doesn't make sense to us. So, that's a bit funny to me.
I tried to write many phrases for the "minimal on basso continuo" series and picked up the sufficient number of them to make 10 tracks in the album. I was very happy then but one day found another notation file that contains quite good phrases, nearly complete and attractive enough. If we didn't put it into the album, it's very likely that it would never find an album to belong to. Therefore, I thought to release this was a must, but it was late, though not TOO late. Okay, to call it a bonus track is my solution.
In case you don't know about etching, it's a method of printing used for old visual arts. The Metropolitan Museum of Art explains etching in this linked page. When I was thinking about the title, I saw etching works of Maurits Cornelis Escher and some other artists. The thing is that music works are, in my opinion, just an outcome and its process is more important. I believe we can say the same for visual arts. To connect our auditory art with visual arts, the title of this work should include a term of some visual art process, I reckoned. The tentative name during production was "New Experiment From North 2", where "North" means our track called "North At Defining Moments."
That work is in the previous album of "Anomalous Folk" and is the first one to have the concept of "minimal on basso continuo." The concept is applied next for "Mutation," as I wrote in its notes page. That was "New Experiment From North (1)" and this is to follow it. I made it relatively early, but just left it due to other various ideas coming up, which ends up with the 10 tracks in the "Auditory Art..." album.
My intention was to feature such acoustic instruments as a guitar within the concept. It consists of an acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, marimba, piano and drums with unplugged vibes. Perhaps the only exception is the sine wave playing the basso continuo.
This is the first two pages of the notation. For "minimal on basso continuo" the organ and sine wave are used for the bass, on which it vaguely implies that A seems the key, like the first note with the second-row organ sounds A.
I can't assert that it's scale music because it also remains ambiguous. You could see it as a scale like A-B-C#-D-D#-F-F#-G. The two-bars pattern uses the limited number of C#s (or the thirds) and none of E (or the fifth) so that it doesn't sound very chordal.
When the guitar appears in Bar 10 (in the two rows at the top), it sounds chordal due to the nature of the instrument, like A sus4 add2, CM7, F# sus-6, B on D#. But that's only within the guitar world. If you regard the bass as A, CM7 becomes Am9, which gets out of the scale, whereas F#... turns out to be A6 add4 or something. (B on D# is changed to B on D# on A? Yes, something like that.) My composition wasn't based on chords but you could analyse how this work goes like this.
To make it more accessible, the guitar is chordal on its nature, but if you add a bass under the "minimal..." concept it becomes quite intriguing. It treats the piano and high acoustic bass in a similar way.
Furthermore, this piece has a lot of tempo changes and trans-scales.
It seems to me that this piece is one way of Jazz's evolution that doesn't exist in the world.
(TI writes:)
This track was also once completed in August last year, and we left it as is, but when we checked it again for this release, we found various parts that we wanted to redo, and also due to the upgrade of Studio One, we made significant changes to the mix.
As a result, the texture has changed a lot from what it was in August last year.
For this track, I was not involved in the composition in MuseScore, but only in mixing the MuseScore score created by TM.
As for the timbre, except for the bass drum, which was created and augmented in Noise Maker, the sounds used in MuseScore were individually exported from MuseScore and mixed. In that sense, the texture is probably similar to our previous release 'Here I am'.
It's titled 'Etching', and the mix also takes an Etching-like approach to printing (the title was only decided on after the song was finished, so it's a coincidence really).
The Sinewave and Organ phrases he's been sounding all along as triggers to cut down on the other phrases.
Specifically, the Sinewave, Organ and Bass Drum phrases trigger the Compression and Gating of the respective tracks. In other words, we are doing the same thing as in etching, "using and adjusting the corrosive properties of the acid to plasticise the object".
The new version of Studio One has a very clear resolution in this area (I'm not sure if it actually improves the specs, but you can clearly hear every detail better, even though the monitor speakers haven't been changed), and it's easier to adjust to the smallest detail.
Specifically, it is now easier to see where each sound disappears, which allows for more precise Gate adjustments, and more precise alignment of the attack of the Bass Drum and the volume level of the Sustain on the Sine Wave.
I think these things have made the Groove created by TM clearer.
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