New Music Upload!

Finally! After months of work, I have a new piece to show you all. This one is called Reflections, and is written for electric guitars, electric bass, drums, synthesizer, violin, and cello. You can listen to it here or over on the Works page along with the rest of my repertoire. This piece has taken quite a bit longer than usual to finish. Hopefully it's worth the wait. Reflections is dedicated to my mother Beverly Curtis on her now not so recent birthday. Happy belated birthday!

I got the name Reflections from the artwork I designed for the piece. It reminds me of a person seeing their reflection in a pool of water. It fits with the rest of the piece too though, given all the delay and reverb used on the guitars. These effects are basically the musical equivalent of a reflection to me. Also, different musical themes are repeated in different ways throughout the piece. For example: The first chorus (2:11) is repeated with new effects and without pauses in the second chorus (3:47). Instead of being long, dreamy, and soaked in reverb, it returns quick, aggressive, and heavily distorted. Another example of reflection would be in chorus 2 and verse 4. The main idea in the guitar lick from verse 4 (6:14) is actually a snippet off the end of the chorus 2 main riff (3:59). A final but slightly more obscure instance of this musical reflecting is in the ending (7:15). Here, the guitar plays some complicated chords made of both fingered notes and harmonics. These chords are then literally reflected by being played in reverse (7:50). In addition, they are rearranged, pitch shifted, and panned around the stereo spectrum. This makes for a very blurry reflection, but a fun one. There are many more examples of musical reflection hidden in Reflections. How many can you find?

Originally, Reflections was to include both a soprano and a tenor singer rather than the violin and cello. I was never able to figure out any lyrics for the piece though. I considered setting something from Psalms, but never found a psalm that felt just right for the piece. Perhaps one day I will figure something out and record another version, but for now enjoy the strings.

As far as instruments go, I played all of the guitar parts for Reflections. I miked up my Engl Ironball amp for both the clean and distorted sounds. As for effects pedals, I only used my Red Panda Context for the reverb/delay. All the effects in the guitar solo were put in after recording in the DAW just to see how they compared to using actual pedals. Spoiler alert: I like my pedals, but the DAW did ok. The drums are a mixture of the Ludwig kit from East West's Ministry of Rock and the different elements from Ministry of Rock 2. I also added the crotales from East West's Symphonic Orchestra to the drum kit. The violin and cello also came from this library. The bass is mostly the Gibson bass from Ministry of Rock 2. The synthesizer I used is my good old buddy DEXED from the last two rock pieces that I wrote. There are a few noises I got from East West's The Dark Side library as well. You can hear them around 2:11.

One of the biggest challenges while creating Reflections was mixing. Trying to get my kick drum to play nice with my bass guitar was very challenging. Throwing the cello in the mix with all of those guitar tracks was kind of difficult to mix at times as well. I thankfully had no DAW gremlins to bug me this time, but I'm pretty sure it's because I switched back to Reaper from Cakewalk. Not going back either. I do like some of Cakewalk's effects better than the ones native to Reaper. However, since both DAWs are loaded on my computer, I can use Cakewalk's effects in Reaper! Score!

Thank you for taking the time to read my article. I hope you enjoy the music. The next piece should come out a good bit quicker than this one though, so you shouldn't have to wait so long next time. Be sure to like/follow me on Facebook and subscribe to my news letter so you're always in the loop about new music uploads, events, etc. If you've done this already, thanks so much for your support!

Have a blessed day,

Nathan C. Curtis

#NewMusic #NathanCurtis