quarantine boredom struck again, so I'm sharing a song I actually wrote almost 20 years ago (the MIDI file says 2001, I'm old!). The original MIDI file was not really usable in its existing state, so I rewrote and re-arranged everything from scratch (including panning) using MuseScore, and then imported it in Ardour for the usual work. I also added a solo (my first attempt to do that since my very first track published here). It took me a couple of days to do everything, and you can listen to it here:
https://soundcloud.com/lminiero/lies
Just to give you some context on its story, I remember writing this at the time as a power ballad, and calling the file "armonia.mid" since I liked the harmonic progressions I had come up with (and I still do). The piece was originally meant to be the second part of a three-tracks suite called "Hope dies last", and had an awful baroque ending that I got rid of for the more somber outro you can hear now. I changed the title to "Lies" because some time ago a few vocal lines came to mind, and the word "lies" too: there currently are no lyrics, actually, but I liked the idea of the story of someone coming to terms with a person who lied to them, so the name stayed.
Technically speaking, nothing special, as it's pretty much the same process I always follow, with a few differences:
- The harp is exactly the same I used in Eurydice, so nothing new.
- Bells playing alternately left and right is a trick I used in the original MIDI file as well. Unfortunately I couldn't find anything that sounded better than the tubular bells in the default Fluidsynth soundfont, so I stuck with that.
- The pad was done using Yoshimi, instead of ZynAddSubFx. The reason is simply that the Yoshimi LV2 plugin is MUCH more user-friendly than the one by ZynAddSubFx (e.g., in terms of choosing the sound you want), which is a pity because I like the latter more (and from my understanding, Yoshimi forked ZynAddSubFx itself some time ago). It does come with some bugs of its own, though, as sometimes for no reason at all it chose to lose the pitch and play out of tune, until I restarted Ardour.
- Strins were done entirely using the KBH Ultima Strings soundfont: I explained how I used them for the first time as an additional layer for strings in Scheherazade, and I liked the effect, so I wanted to check what it would sound like if I used it for all string sections instead. I must say I really like how they sound, even though weirdly enough the soundfont is tuned one octave lower than it's written: I decided to keep it that way (in MuseScore I actually wrote strings to sound higher), rather than transposing, as I did like it more that way.
- The occasional flute is from the default Fluidsynth soundfont, while the occasional horns come from Virtual Playing Orchestra instead.
- Drums, bass and guitars were done as usual. As anticipated, this was also the first time I invested more time on writing and playing a meaningful solo: it took A LOT of attempts to get to what you can hear there, which reminded me why I like composing so much more than playing...
- The piano at the end is played by the default Fluidsynth soundfont too: I tried using the Salamander SFZ, but it sounded way worse for some reason. It's likely I was doing something wrong (in how the piano lines are written first of all), but I didn't spend too much time on it.
- As usual, I used Dragonfly Reverb for everything.
