The works below are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License and ©2013 Gregory Weaver.
Being that I'm a little over two weeks away from entering into the third month of my sabbatical (crazy to think about that), I decided that I need to get serious about finishing and mastering some of my older ideas. I've got a couple of new tunes in the oven, but cranking out tunes in Finale that sound synthy doesn't do me very much good in terms of marketing myself in this day and age. Here are two tunes that I recently finished, both of which might be a bit uplifting:
"Happy-Go-Lucky"
I wrote most of "Happy-Go-Lucky" a while back, but had a lot of cleaning up to do with it. Originally it didn't include drums and it sounded very bare. There was just too much space! I thought that I needed some chordal textures at first because the bass sound was holding down a rhythmic base, but I was completely wrong--drums were the answer, and I knew it immediately after I put them in. Gotta give a shout-out to my old professor, Robert Jospe, since I knew what rhythm I wanted to use. Thanks for teaching me how to groove, Jos!
This tune is meant to be the title screen of a racer, and while I was thinking more "F-Zero" at first, David Graey commented on my SoundCloud, saying that the tune reminds his of the Mario 64 race theme (though he's not sure why, and I'm not totally sure why either, to be honest, haha). I decided to make the picture that of a Mario Kart title screen as a happy medium between his interpretation and my own.
"Monday's Theme" (final edition)
A Scene from Harvest Moon
*Bonus points to whoever locates and correctly identifies the musical quote in this tune!
You might remember this little diddy back when I first posted about it last January. From that post:
"'Monday’s Theme' is a very lazy, easy-going tune. I imagine that if there were actually people playing this, the banjo player would be sitting in a rocking chair on a porch, hat over his or her face with a long piece of wheat hanging out (or something equally as stereotypical). The whistler would be working out in the field, harvesting, gearing up for a long, hard work week, but not getting into things too quickly. Since everyone is so laid back and unworried, they’re just strumming along, not particularly worried about being exactly in time."
That still holds true here. The big difference between the old version and the new version is that I added solos for both the banjo and the bass. Furthermore, influenced by Kenley's suggestions in the comments of the original post, I looked to shake up the banjo part a bit. If I weren't just trying to knock this tune out, I'd take some more of Kenley's ideas for a spin, not to mention add even more variation in the banjo part.
Thanks for listening. Feedback is always appreciated!
