Posted
Hi,
Recently, I have started to flex my Synfire learning muscles. Synfire is all about the music and it focuses me on that it is all about the music.
I have been struggling with a difficult guitar piece - the difficulty is that it is so simple, and yet, the piece needs to have certain variation and movement as well as mood transformation as the key signature, and time signature, shifts. The root chords are actually trivial: Gmaj, Am, Dm. And within those, it is about how the notes of the guitar are selected, from which fret position and with what choice of inversions or variations.
I have used two guitars as "feedstock" to feed Synfire: (1) RealGuitar from MusicLab with their phrase (fingerpicking, arpeggios, licks etc...) library and (2) Strum Electric from Applied Acoustic Systems with their strum library combined with my own "close-note" playing (remember, keyboardists can't stretch individual fingers apart that far!!!).
What I got from Synfire was th ability to play with many, many variations *extremely* fluidly in an unbroken, almost like a stream of consciousness awareness, listening to the *intention* of the music and its emotional message to me rather than struggling in the weeds with technicalities.
SO: I found that by breaking the chords into picked figures, and then alternating the figures between the octaves with inversions, and some rather stunningly simple intervening note additions, that I ended up with a really great track. In fact, when the song is done (it is for a band with a vocalist etc...) I will make sure to mention the use of Synfire and have a pointer to it when it comes out (later this year).
Synfire reduced the time it took for me to audition different styles, approaches, and figures in playing to create just the right result --- this process could have easily taken a few days of work and instead it was done in one evening :)
I hope that my experience is useful and contributes in some way as to how I am finding Synfire helping me with the challenges in my workflows.
[I am also adding that the "synth guitar" is being thrown out but the *score* is being done by real guitarists].
Cheers
Wed, 2012-01-04 - 15:04 Permalink
Thanks a lot for taking the time to share your experience with us. I'm really happy you say it the way you do. That's exactly what Synfire was made for! Supporting human feel and the touch of "real" (hand made) music was my top design goal.
Making simple songs sound great is a true strength of Synfire Pro, because you can develop the texture (rhythm, interaction between instruments, melodic shapes) independently from the song (harmony). Once you have a groove that works, you can apply it to any song that might come.
When I was producing pop music back in the mid 80's, I got tired by the trivial compositions very quickly. After a few hours in the studio, everything just sounded boring and we started adding more layers of sound to compensate this, but effectively this ruined the whole thing.
Less is more, but there has to be more than nothing. Even if a song has a very trivial chord structure, it's all the subtle nuances, time shifts, melodic variation, ornaments, passing tones, intermediate dominants and everything that make the difference.
Wed, 2012-01-04 - 18:46 Permalink
Thank you.
Then I will share more experiences on this thread as they come up. I have fairly good creative musical workload this year so I am sure I will get to share more along ese lines. I will look into getting permission at the appropriate time from the publishers to share some sequences of files here (such as *before* and *after*) along with some of the steps to achieve the results.