New Ambience: Hunting Grounds
Added 2025-03-19 17:02:41 +0000 UTCGreetings Patrons,
The genesis of this track was a simple piano part that I ran into a fuzz pedal. In this case, a clone of the legendary Shin-ei Fuzz-wah (minus the wah) made by British maker Fredric Effects. I'm trying to incorporate more analog external effects into music lately as I just love how unpredictable they can be on various sources. But back to the piano - it was the start of the track, but not the basis. It was the guitar part that I latched onto and made me want to flesh it out. More distortion pedals for that of course! Plus some excellent in-the-box distortion and saturation plugins. I especially loved how gritty the low string pulses became.
The other central element was electric violin. In general, I have a bit of a dislike-loathe relationship with electric violins. In my band days they were often necessary to combat feedback on loud stages, but I never thought they never sounded very good. In this case I played it sul tasto (on the fingerboard). a popular orchestral technique that gives strings a raspy, breathy tone. In this case it almost sounds like a duduk.
Once all those things were in place it was just a matter of finding balance with all the low end energy that was getting amplified. I think I tamed it - mostly.
I'm not sure at which point I thought about dragons. The music has a bit of melancholy, but it's also got a lot of latent power. I think the process of taming the wildness of the distorted elements is what led me to dragons. The melancholic elements could easily be transformed into solitude, hence a lone dragon, hunting in a valley, viewed from a clifftop.
The ambience here is blustery cliffs, distant rumbling thunder, scree fall and of course, a dragon on the wing moving about the valley.
As this track is in Patreon exclusive sneak-peek mode, I've included the mixed version (live on the site next week) as well as music-only, and ambience-only versions. Additionally, I created 2 'No Dragon' versions for some general style blustery ambience.
More additionally, I went back to the original piece and extracted 2 loops that are presented in both .ogg and .mp3 format. The loops are mostly the same except loop 1 retains the more melodic piano part and loop 2 does not.
Thank you all, as always, for your continuing support.
Best,
Tim
