So There's This Song I'm working on....

First thing's first, I can't take full credit for this song (that's currently in the mixing
stage). My good buddy Nick came up with the concept after listening to some Ron Jarzombek tunes. Who's Ron Jarzombek you may ask?

Now I'm not a huge fan of the shredding style that's mostly associated with Ron (though I can't say that I'm not a fan at all), this particular tune had more prog elements than the shreddy kind, so I asked my buddy Nick if he'd let me produce/finish his piece. The name of his piece: ThisIsNotASubliminalMessage.

In a nutshell, the whole idea behind this tune is to say the phrase, "This is not a subliminal message" subliminally as many ways possible. It might sound silly at first, but this piece proved to be a very challenging piece to finish.

Here are some of the techniques utilized:

The first obstacle was to make this piece musical. As an electronic musician, this piece could have easily gone the way of an ambient, sonic element based piece and I didn't want that for this particular piece (though the intro is more of a sonic soundscape). So step one in achieving musicality is creating a main melody of some sort. This is what Nick came up with.

This is a transcription from the chart that I made for Nick. The idea here is that each letter in the phrase, "This is not a subliminal message" receives a note. Because of this you are confined to the order of letters in the phrase and of course it makes for a great melody. The rhythm was written by Nick and together, the rhythm and the melody make an awesome main melody.

The second genius technique brought to the table by Nick was implementing Morse code. It's a great way to be subliminal and rhythmic all at once. Here's how it's implemented.

The resulting figure resulted in a very rhythmic, METAL!!11!!, and proggy passage. The long tones in Morse Code are represented by the top staff and the short tones, of course, are represented by the bottom staff (lead and rhythm guitar respectively).

I'll post the rest of the techniques used either tonight or tomorrow. As for right now, I have a 6 hour mixing session, and I'm hoping to finish the mix of this tune by tonight. If not come extremely close.

-Nate