So, I've been working on some new music - for a long time actually.Anyways, I'm currently working on a new album called Soft Return.
I've been writing a title track which I wanted to be an instrumental piece. Something that went through a load of different moods and sections.
I started with a simple descending piano passage and following this have developed the theme into a kind of oriental section. I'm always wary of treading all over different cultures and traditions with my clumsy western shoes but I've always been drawn to the far east and especially love music (often English of American pop) which shows the influence of Japan, China and so forth within the confines of a standard 3 minute pop track. I'm thinking of Joe Jackson's Chinatown from Night & Day or Aja by Steely Dan at the moment, but you hear it a lot.
Anyways, what I'm getting at is fairly particular.
While working on this piece I wanted to use a sho type sound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8D), and spent a long while trying to find a VST with a similar sound or some samples online that I could use. But this was pretty difficult and proved a bit of a fruitless search.
Nonetheless, I persevered and decided the best way forward was to think of the sound itself and try to recreate the sounds with what I had. I thought, well it's kind of like a fluttery flute but there's the reedyness too which a flute doesn't have - more like an oboe. So (and this probably seems quite simple) I put the two together. I use something called Garritan Personal Orchestra as a VST plug ina for a lot of my output, it's really versitile. So I loaded up a flute (a really breathy one) and loaded up an oboe. I played the melody on the oboe sound first, the doubled it exactly on the flute. Then played around with the levels of both of these until I got something that sounded like a sho.
(NB: Brian Wilson when writing Pet Sounds bemoaned the fact that the instruments he was hearing in his head didn't exist so he created them using two or more instruments at the same time. LIsten carefully and you'll hear things he described as a Guitarinet where the guitar and the clarinet play the same thing and their combined timbres result in something other worldly and interesting).
So after my experiments with the balance between these two sounds, I still wasn't quite happy with it. It lacked the exotic strangeness that we with western equl temperament background find so enthralling in eastern music. The pitch. The quarter tones, the bends the dissonance. In short the exoticism. So I routed the oboe part only through a very slow vibrato plug in, adjusted the depth so it was almost inperceivable and combined this output with the flute again. I think it came pretty close.
Just to go on - I also overdubbed about 7 ukelele parts strumming the same chords in rapid succession which gave a lovely bed like a chinese cheng / harp and added tubular bells (also from the Garritan) to replicate the dissonant gongs and a marimba for something a little more blocky.
It was fun - will share the results with you as soon as!
G.
