»Notes: The Darkness Beneath

I came up with this song after getting some good ideas whilst coming back from the library on the 209 and then walking through the pouring rain down from White Lee. I get good ideas a lot when I do this but it's not often I can actually summon the energy to do a recording at half eleven after an evening library session.

The song is quite clearly influenced by Metallica, I've been wanting to do something akin to 'The Call of Ktulu' for a while now, as it's one of my favourite songs. I hope it isn't too obvious that I was ripping off/drawing inspiration from that particular song.

A couple of the drum patterns I used in this song were attempts at getting something similar to the drums in Call of Ktulu. That's one of the most blatant rip-offs in the song anyway.

I've been listening to Nile a lot so I thrown in a bit of locrian to give it an eastern flavour.

The thumbnail for this song was taken from Bob Eggleton's webstite and if I were doing things properly I'd have emailed him to ask if I could use it. But of course that could have taken a while, and he could have said no, so giving him credit here seems a slight compromise. Anyway, his site is really fucking awesome and if I had the money I'd definitely want to buy some of the stuff on there.

I recorded this song just by building it up from loops, gradually adding more parts. I tried to adhere to my new rules for songs which is to keep the simultaneous guitar parts to a minimum, avoid simultaneous parts where the same notes are being played (if there are two guitars playing at once they need to be doing different things, rhythm/lead or lead/lead rather than rhythm/rhythm), to try and inject some tunes and melodies into things (so it sounds nice and is catchy) and to make sure the bass isn't mirroring the rhythm guitar part exactly.

I think this is the first song I've done with something resembling a bass lead part.

The barking and rumbling noises at the beginning are supposed to be 'Wild Dogs' and 'Rolling Thunder' respectively and I got them from a sound effects CD I borrowed from the library.

As a result of the way the song took shape over the course of recording, I'll have to actually learn the order of the parts properly and do a proper drum track if the song were to be played 'live' by the hypothetical band which I'm not in yet.

I recorded Oberon and Tristram in a similar way to this song. The song is similar to Oberon in that I used distortion on the bass in the later half of the song. All three share similar themes of evil/darkness lurking undergound, and of course, they are all instrumentals.

If I remix this song, I think I'll add some stereo effects, but not have the panning to be too harsh, so the harmony guitar parts won't sound weird.

If I were to improve the song I'd try and make it a bit longer (I've yet to reach the eight minute mark, at which point a song becomes an 'epic'), I'd also try and introduce some tempo changes of some kind (I've been wanting to put in tempo changes for a while now but it's difficult doing them if I don't practice songs prior to recording).

These are mostly here for my convenience.