Autobiographical writing

Something rash, crazy, ambitious, dangerous, surprising, or uncanny. Well, I can offer ambitious and surprising, but you won’t find the others here.

Everybody needs distractions, escapism, hobbies. The work required for success, given typical notions of the word, can be a chore sometimes, so in my first year of university I decided to use some leisure time to test myself, to prove to myself that many years of guitar playing - while I should have been working - have actually produced results. So, my experiment was to write and record an instrumental track, something that I could be proud of, something vaguely material that I could look back on, and listen to, and tell myself; that rocks.

In March 2009 a friend of mine sent me a drum and bass track he’d made, I told him it was ok, but I was going to improve it for him. It was a fairly long and arduous process, finding some good recording software, setting up amplifiers, mixers, foot-pedals and finally the Vintage Metal Axxe itself. If you’ve not tried to write music before it can be hard to understand the process involved, especially when you want to fill a five-and-a-half minute backing track with varied and interesting passages, whilst constrained to only one instrument. Thankfully, the guitar was versatile enough for the job.

You may at this point be thinking, “this isn’t really experimentation”, and in a sense you’d be right. I can play a guitar, I understand musical concepts. The reason this particular endeavour was new territory is that I’d never recorded a track that’s solely my own.

Certainly not a hybrid of two vastly conflicting genres; drum n’ bass, with metal.

Have you heard a drum n’ bass/metal instrumental before? Thought not, neither had I. Interestingly, working with the backing track forced me into new areas, moving away from the guitar playing I’ve known for years into new scales, new techniques; and I was relishing it. I’d get frustrated when something wasn’t working right, overjoyed when it did work, and sometimes just stumble upon new ways to make the music interesting, to make it exciting. A few of the sections just came from nowhere, just playing around to the backing track and realising “hey, that sounds pretty cool”. Writing out sections that had worked, recording for twenty minutes at a time, and just playing around ended up producing some musical phrases, riffs and licks that I’m immensely proud of.

The final result took about a day to nail; recording software can be a real bitch if you’re not used to it. But finally, it took shape. Arabic scales, tapped passages, speed arpeggios and some weird rhythm work produced a track that to this day I’m still proud of, and I still play along with. I find it hilarious that I’m listed on my own iTunes. It may not have been a typical experiment, and you may have no interest in anything you’ve just read, but it was a personal endeavour to test myself, to push myself into new territories, and that to me is experimentation. This time, it paid off.