New Music Upload!

Welcome to another New Music Upload! Today, for your listening pleasure, I present Pyroclastic Surge, my newest composition. Listen to this crushing tune in the video below or on the Works page. It will also be available for purchase soon at iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, and other retailers and streaming services. This piece is dedicated to my friend and guitar instructor Dave Cross of Rising Star Guitar Academy in honor of his recent birthday. Happy birthday Dave! Without your teaching I'd probably never have been able to play and/or write this song. Be sure to check out Dave's album, Arabian Storm, and his website at http://www.risingstarguitar.com/ as well!

For those who don't know, a pyroclastic surge is a cloud of super-heated gas and particulates capable of moving at hundreds of miles per hour, and even climb over hills and other obstacles. This speed and ability to travel uphill makes these surges extremely deadly and nigh inescapable if you are within range of one.

Considering my song is sort of a death metal / grindcore sounding piece, the name seemed fitting to me. Its constantly changing, fast paced riffs reflect the nature of such a natural disaster quite well. I added some homemade lava noises and a somewhat distressing shrieking noise at the beginning of the piece to create a bit of tension. There are also some pitch shifted and reversed bass sounds in this initial soundscape, lending some girth to the mix. This, coupled with the first riff, sort of represents a volcanic eruption, or at least the makings of one. Another element that adds intensity to Pyroclastic Surge is the constant interuption of duplets. The majority of the piece is in compound time, making the duplets more jarring than the rest of the triplets surrounding them.

I used the duplets to make metric modulations as well. Basically, a metric modulation is when you reassign how many notes are in a beat by replacing the current value with one of known length. For example, in measure 45 (where the 9/8 is), all the instruments are chugging along on 8th note duplets. However, in measure 49, I reassign the value of the 8th note duplet to make up a single quarter note rather than a dotted quarter note.

This particular modulation mostly effects how the notation looks rather than an causing an actual tempo change, but it makes the next modulation look much nicer on paper. If I didn't modulate here, the notes in measures 49 - 53 would be made up of duplets. This wouldn't be bad if it weren't for the metric modulation at 52-53 where I change the value of the beat from four to six 16th notes per beat. If it were still in duplets, there would be a measure of 3/16 with a single 16th note duplet inside. Ugly! This modulation effectively pulls back the tempo a bit from that of the beginning of the piece.

There are several other examples of this metric modulation technique scattered throughout Pyroclastic Surge. Can you spot them all?

There is an interesting drum technique called a gravity blast utilized in a couple of places in Pyroclastic Surge. This technique is basically a one handed drum roll. Sounds pretty tough, but it's not as hard as you may think. All you really have to do is use the edge of your snare as a pivot point for the drum stick. When you strike the drum, the stick immediately pivots upward on the edge. Then, you lift your hand straight up, causing the stick to pivot forward and strike the drum a second time. In essence, this technique doubles the speed of your one handed strikes, but is not as loud as a regular strike.

For the artwork in Pyroclastic Surge, I decided to do some tweaking with photo editors (Pixlr X and Microsoft Word this time) to some volcano pictures. I found a nice base to start with and began to add some effects to the image when I noticed that there appeared to be most of a skeletal face sort of embedded in the mountain. You can see the eyes and the nose if you look at where the magma and fire are escaping. I decided to emphasize the face, adding a bit more lava here and there, finally ending up with this.

I was going to add a cave with stalactites and fire as a mouth, but wasn't able to pull that off convincingly. It kind of made my volcano look more like a bad jack-o-lantern than anything. The second piece of art gives you a view of the volcano from a safe distance. It kind of looks like a face is peering out of the smoke from the volcano.

Thank you all for taking the time to check out Pyroclastic Surge! It should be available on iTunes as early as today and on other platforms like Amazon, Google Play, and streaming services very shortly thanks to DistroKid. This is actually the first song I've released in a format where it can be bought, so I'm super excited! More of my library will be available soon! Check out the rest of the website for more great music. Be sure to subscribe to my New Music Mailing List and follow me on social media for more updates on my new music.

Have a blessed day!

Nathan C. Curtis

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