La Danza Del Vestito Rosso

A little soundtrack number. For some reason SC has compressed the living hell out of it, but there you go. I'm liking the "Brass Diver Crimson" profile for bass, used it yesterday too but here just used to place a couple of key notes in here to add tension.

Thanks Monkey_Man I'm afraid I don't know it (the breadth of my ignorance is sadly... well... breathtaking to be honest, sorry to dissapoint).

Mostly what I learned from this is to maybe figure out a tune first, then do the orchestration... then play the tune on top of that rather than the other way around, then it would have taken less time and sounded better but ho-hum.

I did, but honestly in parts here because I didn’t want to spend the day learning the tune, although it would have been played better if I had.

So lets see the man behind the curtain. So today I was listening to Rachmaninov in the car and liking the way orchestra and piano came together which lead to an attempt at this. The initial run is much faster than I could play, thus I had to slow it down to half speed in order to record that part to sound right, it would be trivial for a concert pianist but I’m focused more on making a production quickly and will have to learn my fast scales separately, this scale (Gm) has a “leading tone” (added F#) which gives it a little more interest and allows it to fit the beat nicely. From there it’s back recording at normal speed and just heads out into improv land. I started with the chord/melody sequence that leads into the main melody where the partial chords are handled separately in each hand which I like the tension of (and stole from Beethoven because he seems to do this a lot), so left might play the third and right the first and fifth in different octaves. Then I started to play around with let chords and a lead line, which lead to the left hand pattern. Once I had a couple of chords and short line I sat down worked out the rest of the chords and played the left hand line in on its own then improvised the lead, punching in and replacing bits with fluffed notes or when I got a better idea. That allowed me to knock it out pretty quick and fake sounding like a competent-ish player.

Thanks deangersmith and Monkey_Man I’ll get this stuff playing while I’m at work so I can absorb it all as these are full on concerts! Very cool so far though. I hear how this must have influenced John Williams and other film composers. If I’m trying to think of a solid use of that sort of dropping off broken/missing syncopation motif in more modern times it then probably stuff like Eberhard Weber and some of those piano solos on Take 5 by Brubeck of course.