since we're on lockdown in Italy, it did help to have a fun hobby to keep my mind out of things, so I eventually managed to complete one of the tracks I had put on hold for quite some time. This was also an attempt to do another collaboration with my sister, who's locked down somewhere else and so had to send me her vocals via WhatsApp Hopefully they'll sound alright anyway!
Coming to the track, I had actually got to a good point 3-4 months ago, and then I stopped for a few different reasons: mainly Witcher 3 (installing it proved to be a big mistake, two months of my life basically disappeared! ) and the fact that I then started investing much more time on classical music instead.
That said, these past two weekends I've come back to it, and it's now ready, and I called it "Scheherazade":
https://soundcloud.com/lminiero/scheherazade
You should all be pretty familiar with the story of Scheherazade already, but to summarize, it's the premise to the whole "Arabian Nights" collection. A king/sultan is betrayed by the woman he loves, and so decides that he'll spend each night with a different woman and then have her killed. Eventually Scheherazade decides to take the matter into her own hands, and offers herself to be the next victim. When she meets the king, she starts telling him a fascinating story, thus hooking him; the morning comes, but the story isn't over, so the king spares her, waiting for het to continue the story. She finishes that one, but starts another, and the same happens night after night, until (1001 or so tales later), the king finally comes to reason and decides to marry Scheherazade.
My track tries to tell the tale of the last night: after all this time, Scheherazade is still scared she might not see the light of day, and prepares what might be her last tale, in what is a more atmospheric intro, with my sister giving Scheherazade her beautiful voice. Then the music changes with a bang, and it becomes a depiction of the tale itself: adventorous, captivating, emotional, magic carpets flying all around! Then the morning comes, and the music becomes tense, since we don't know what will happen next, up to the gran finale, when we finally get to a happy ending.
That's it in a nutshell, and I hope the track manages to capture the spirit of the narration I wanted to follow. I certainly did have a lot of fun writing this middle eastern themes, trying to merge them with what I'm more familiar with. I particularly love middle eastern themes in rock music (Kashmir by Led Zeppelin, Gates of Babylon by Rainbow and Sails of Charon by Scorpions might be the obvious references, here), and a good deal of inspiration came from tracks like the Desert Dance/Nights of Arabia combo by Kamelot or Babylon by Stratovarius (and, more recently, music by the amazing Isreaeli band Orphaned Land!), so as usual you'll hear the heavy stuff I can't seem to be able to keep out of anything.
On the technical part, there's actually more tracks in this than I put in any of my other efforts, I believe (which may have resulted in something that is a bit more of a mess, but whatever...). There's a lot of different percussions, for instance, and stuff like strings have more layers. In general, I ended up using many more free Windows VSTs as well, for the simple reason that, at the time for some instruments I couldn't find better alternatives: I've only recently found out about this soundfont, which sounds quite amazing, so I'll probably use that as well in the future.
Since a good portion had already been done months ago, this was still written with Lilypond: I actually started using MuseScore more recently, so this might change in the future, even though I still like Lilypond a lot, especially for quickly write ideas down.
For the parts I played myself, I used pretty much the same equipment as last time, that is an Akai LPK25 MIDI keyboard, my beloved Arctic White Mexican Fender HSS Stratocaster, my trusty EVH Wolfgang Standard, and a cheap Hofner bass. For guitars, I used the EVH for almost everything, except the pseudo-acoustic interlude in the middle: for that I actually wanted an acoustic guitar, but I didn't have access to the one I used previously (the one I used in Mary, which belongs to my sister), and the Yamaha I own doesn't have an integrated pickup. Some weeks ago I bought an external one, but the quality is truly awful, so I had to fall back to the clean sounds of the Strato instead: unfortunately it doesn't sound nearly as I wanted (more on that below), but it's better than nothing, and I can always re-record that part later on.
To go in more detail, and in order of "appearance" mostly:
- Both the nay and oud at the beginning both come from an amazing free Windows VST called EasternONE: it has a ton of middle eastern instruments, with different ways of playing them, and I think it really sounds great too! It comes with microtonal capabilities on some specific notes, which I decided not to use though. I actually wanted the nay to be a duduk, initially, but the only one I could find had a very short sustain, so it really didn't work for the part.
- The pad was done with ZynAddSubFx, and I love the ancient/mystic feel it gives. I can't remember which preset I ended up using exactly (I tested many of them), but I can try finding it again if anyone's interested.
- The clean and chorused guitars in the intro were processed with Rakarrack (as you may know, my go-to application for all clean guitars, by now). This time I also used Rakarrack to "emulate" an acoustic guitar later in the track: I used two tracks, one with the "12 Strings" preset and another with the "Acoustic Bright" preset, and played with with the Fender. As I was saying, it doesn't sound like what I'd like there at all, but hopefully it's not completely awful either...
- Strings are mostly done using Virtual Playing Orchestra (with different, and panned, tracks for violins, violas, celli and basses), but there's another layer using a soundfont called "kbh-strings.sf2" as well: I remember someone saying how good they thought it sounded, and I wanted to give them a try! I used this additional track to be somewhere between 2nd violins and violas, and I think the overall effect is not that bad.
- The sparse horns and brass are VPO too, nothing fancy.
- As anticipated, there's a ton of percussions in the middle part, and they're done using different pieces. Timpanis, cymbalis, chimes, triangles and tambourines I played myself using VPO (I was surprised to see how many percussion options it actually had!), while the middle eastern percussions I played using a Windows VST called Daf, and I think the overall effect is quite cool. I tried to give room to all of them using some panning.
- The dulcimer was rendered using yet another free Windows VST, by Spitfire Labs. I think it sounds really good, and it has several options as you can hear from the trailer on the website. Unfortunately, for some reason, the Spitfire Labs VST decided to stop working with Wine recently... good thing I had already converted them at the time! But I hope this will get fixed, sooner or later, as they have a lot of very interesting effects, that I used other times in the past.
- Heavy guitars, as usual, were processed with guitarix, using the "rogue" preset. The lead guitars towards the end use the "Nevermore lead" preset instead.
- Drums too were done the usual way, using DrumGizmo and the Muldjord kit to render the patterns sketched with Hydrogen.
- Choirs were done the same way I did in Mary, that is two separate tracks for the four voices rendered by VPO (which actually uses the excellent Sonatina choir samples).
- In the gran finale, the loud last chord is also played by a kaman, another traditional instrument that was rendered using, you guessed it, a free VST (I probably exaggerated a bit, this time!).
- I used the excellent Dragonfly Reverb by Michael Willis once more, using two different reverbs that I then allocated separate tracks on.
- Audio effects like the atmospheric wind in the background at the beginning and the wedding party at the end are samples I found on FreeSound.org, and I liked right away. The "wedding party" music is apparently an actual recording of a traditional lebanese wedding, and I think it really captures the happyness of the moment.