Theory Thursday: The Basics

What is music?

Music has been called the art of noise, and in some sense, that’s one of the best descriptions of music that we have. We all know intuitively what music is, but describing it can be tough. How does one adequately describe a phenomenon that encompasses variety as wide as Tibetan Buddhist monk overtone throat singing, garage rock, hip-hop, and dub-step? What all of these have in common is an organization of sound and silence over a defined period of time.

By this definition, our first entries into the realm of music theory will be a description of these three concepts: sound, silence, and time. We'll take them one lesson at a time.

Sound

Before we get any further in discussing sound (as it relates to music), there are a number of terms that we need to define that can unfortunately sometimes be used interchangeably. I'm going to define these terms now, but their meanings will become clearer as we progress. These terms are tone, pitch, and note.

Tone - a musical sound

Pitch - the degree of highness or lowness of a tone

Note - a single tone having a specified pitch and duration

Basically tones are our most basic unit of describing musical sounds.

Modern electric guitars have 6 or more strings and 20 or more frets, but even on a 9 string guitar with 30 frets, there are only 12 unique tones. On any of our instruments, there are just 12 tones.

Take a look at your guitar’s fretboard or the guitar in the photo. If you have fretboard inlays, often times the 12th fret has a special design — maybe something as simple as two dots instead of one — but there’s usually something that offsets fret 12 from the rest of the frets. This is no accident!

Try playing an open string on your guitar — even if you haven’t tuned the string. Now on that very same string, finger the 12th fret and play the string. It sounds the same, just a bit higher, right?

The same thing will happen if you finger the first fret, then again the 13th fret, then 2nd & 14th, and 3rd & 15th, etc.

On a guitar, every 12 frets, the cycle of tones repeats. The same thing happens on a musical keyboard: every 12 keys, the cycle of tones repeats. On a keyboard, it’s easier to visualize because there is a repeating visual pattern:

Take a look at the image of the keyboard above. Using a toothpick, fingernail, or anything else with a point, find one of the white keys just left of a grouping of two black keys. Now count 12 keys to the right, including the black keys. You should land again on a similar-shaped white key that is just left of another grouping of 2 black keys. If you have a keyboard available, try playing keys that are 12 apart. What do you notice? They should sound like the same tone, but the leftmost key will sound lower than the rightmost key. As an experiment, try separating by 24 or even 36 keys.

What all of this means in practical terms is: everything we’re going to learn about music theory uses only 12 tones. All of the music we love — and even the music we don’t — is all formed using a system of 12 tones.

The 12 Tones

The 12 musical tones have names corresponding with the English alphabet. First, there are the 7 pitches that correspond to the repeating white keys on a keyboard. These are simply:

A, B, C, D, E, F, G

If you look at the white keys on the following diagram of a musical keyboard, notice that the pattern of tones just repeats over and over.

Where things get just a bit more tricky are the “in-between” tones — the ones represented by the black keys. These still use the same letters as the white keys, but they have modifier symbols called accidentals that tell us the tone is just a nudge higher or lower than its letter name. The "♯" symbol is pronounced sharp, and the "♭" symbol is pronounced flat, so "A♭" is pronounced "A flat".

Notice that these black keys have two different names on each key. Don't worry about this just yet -- you don't need to memorize right now. Notice however that there is a pattern to the names. For example, the black key tone named C♯/D♭ is both higher than C and lower than D. Soon enough we'll learn when to use which tone name, but for now just try to see the pattern, understanding that "♭" means lower than and "♯" means higher than.

Summary

So for today's lesson, you should memorize the following:

• Tones are the most basic unit of musical sound.
• There are 12 unique tones.
• The "♭" symbol is pronounced flat and it means lower than.
• The "♯" symbol is pronounced sharp and it means higher than.

Woodshed Wednesday: Excerpt from "Spheres"

Musicians sometimes talk about "woodshedding" or "hitting the woodshed". This means a focused and purposeful practice session, often times intended to refine one's playing of a specific song or musical phrase. With my "Woodshed Wednesdays" posts, I'll share with you some of the things I'm working on, including challenging excerpts from my own songs.

To start things off, I want to share with you a short excerpt from my song "Spheres". This little lick comes in at about 1:03 and it is one of the more challenging parts of the song. I'll do an update later with some close-up video (update... video now available below!), but for now, here's the tablature for the lick (click to enlarge).

Crash Course in Tablature Notation

If you're unfamiliar with tablature notation, it's actually pretty easy. The two musical staves above represent the same musical information. The top staff is a traditional treble clef lowered by an octave, and it shows all the usual stuff: key, time signature, repeats note duration and rhythm. The bottom staff is tablature notation. There's little in the way of time, duration, or rhythm in tablature, but what it does convey is the combination of string and fret number for each note listed in the top staff.

The top line of the tablature staff represents your thinnest string and the bottom line is your thickest string. Each number represents a fret number. So for that first note, it is the thinnest string at the 15th fret. The rhythm of this lick is easy because every note is the same length. If you're new to musical notation, including tablature, fear not! Every Thursday I'll be posting a new lesson on music theory, and we'll be covering the basics of both traditional and tablature notation. As a guitarist, I'm a huge fan of tablature notation, so you don't need to worry, all of my examples will have both traditional and tablature notation.

Back to the Lick

The lick uses all 6 strings, and in several spots I skip over adjacent strings. String skipping can make any lick hard to play evenly, so to help even out my own playing, I decided to play the lick entirely with alternate picking. This means every odd numbered note in the sequence is a downstroke and every even numbered note is an upstroke. Alternate picking is the best way to get a nice even rhythm, especially with faster licks like this, because your picking hand just has to focus on the smooth up & down motion.

Alternate picking can trip you up with transitions like the 5th note of the sequence to the 6th note where there is a downstroke on the B string followed by an upstroke on the D string, skipping over the G string. There are numerous instances throughout this lick where a string skip happens in the opposite direction of the alternate picking flow. The trick is to start slow. Try mastering just the first 8 notes. Once you get that, move to the first 16 notes, then eventually the full 32-note sequence -- then try playing the whole thing 4 times in a row.

Use a metronome and set it to as slow a tempo as you need, making certain that you're playing each note in the sequence evenly. Focus on the alternate picking, because once you get the hang of it, you'll be able to introduce quick acrobatic, string-skipping lines into your own licks with even fluidity.

Update! Here's some video...


Have Fun Woodshedding!!!

Tech Tuesday: Guitar Tone on "Legacy"

Starting today and hopefully repeating every Tuesday, I'll be writing a short bit about some piece of technology or gear related to music making. My goal is to help any of you fellow musicians out there to make informed decisions about what gear will help you to make better music, easier, and without spending too much money on unnecessary stuff.

Let me start by expressing my honest and heartfelt gratitude to all of you who have bought my album "Legacy" and sincere thanks for the wonderful comments and praises. One of the compliments I've gotten a number of times has been on my guitar sound. So today's piece will be focused entirely on the guitar rig I used to record the album.

If you scroll back through prior posts, you can see that I've already shown the nine guitars I used on the album. What may come as a surprise is just how simple my amp and effects setup was. My guitar plugged straight into my Mesa Boogie Mark 5 Twenty Five.

For every song with the exception of "Orbit", I used "lead" channel 2, and my settings were pretty consistent from song to song. Gain at around 50%, Treble & Mids at around 1-2 o'clock, Bass between 10-12 o'clock, and Master set so that my peaks were between -6 dB and -3 dB on my computer's audio interface. I have the graphic EQ set to the usual Mesa "V" shape, although the boosts and cuts were about 75%. I mainly used the Mk IIC+ and Mk IV profiles.

For "Orbit", I used the "clean" channel 1 with the Clean profile, and the tone settings were about the same as my crunch tone, aside from the Gain being pretty low (maybe around 7-8 o'clock).

In the amp's effects loop, I had nothing more than my TC Electronic Flashback Mini Delay pedal. I created my own "Tone Print" for Legacy, but I have since found that the "Modulation Delay" Tone Print created by the super awesome guitarist Pete Thorn was actually a refined and better sounding version of my creation, so I've since switched to that. My delay settings stayed pretty consistent from song to song, and my strategy was to use the delay more like a less-defined reverb sound vs a clear & precise echo.

My settings were roughly: Delay @ 175-250ms, Feedback @ 12 o'clock, and Level @ just loud enough to hear the repeats.

I had the amp plugged into one of my Marshall 4x12" speaker cabinets, just for monitoring. I used the amp's "CabClone" output to capture a direct signal without having to mess around with microphones and the absolutely horrid acoustics in my studio room.

Believe it or not, that's it for my sound on Legacy!

Just yesterday, I added a TC Electronic Hall Of Fame Mini Reverb after my Flashback in the effects loop, and I'm already in love. You'll most certainly hear this combination on my next project.

Music Monday: My First Album(s)

Having just released my first album "Legacy", I started thinking about the first album I got from my parents and I also the first album I bought on my own.

My Very First Album

When I was 9 years old, Michael Jackson "Thriller" had come out just about a month before Christmas, and my parents bought it for me on vinyl that Christmas. A solid six of the nine tracks are songs I still very much love to this day (Wanna Be Startin' Somethin', The Girl Is Mine, Thriller, Beat It, Billie Jean, Human Nature). For a first album, I think I did alright!

Although this album is now almost 34 years old, the songwriting, the musicianship, and the production still stand the test of time.

I didn't know until MANY years later that Steve Lukather and Eddie Van Halen played the guitar on "Beat It" (yes, one listen to that solo now, and it's clearly Eddie, but I was young...). 

The First Album I Bought

By about 1984, I was starting to learn to play keyboards and synthesizers, and by 1986, I was also learning to play electric guitar. If there was a crossover moment for me, it had to be the song "Jump" by Van Halen. It was a killer synthesizer song, but it also had amazing guitar playing. (Hey! There's that Eddie Van Halen guy again...)

Now although "1984" by Van Halen was one of the early albums I bought, my first album with my own money was "Ride The Lightning" by Metallica on cassette. I was new to heavy metal, but all of my friends were into it. I had borrowed a small stack of tapes from my good friend Damascus, and "Ride The Lightning" was one that really stood out to me.

This choice would end up setting the pace for my guitar playing for the following 10-12 years, as I became obsessed with Metallica. I eventually bought all of their albums and eventually learned to play all of their songs. For a short period in college, I was even the lead guitarist in a primarily Metallica cover band (we covered a few other bands too, but Metallica was our bread & butter). Coincidentally, "Ride The Lightning" was also the first album I bought on CD!

So what were your first albums and what impact did they have on you?

Theory Thursday: Welcome!

Starting next week, I'm going to post a weekly lesson on music theory, geared specifically at guitarists. If you play a different instrument, you should be able to follow along, too (it's just that as a guitarist, I'll be using my instrument for the examples).

We're going to start from the very beginning, assuming very little knowledge of anything related to music theory. These lessons aren't going to teach you the skills you need to play the guitar, but rather the goal is to get you the knowledge you'll need to make your own music or have a deeper understanding of other people's music.

What you need to know:

• A very basic understanding of the guitar (or whatever instrument you play):
• How to tune a 6-string guitar to standard tuning
• How to hold the instrument and properly fret and pick

What IS Music Theory?

There are a lot of confusing and contradicting notions about music theory. Some folks will tell you it’s a set of restrictive and oppressive rules, others will say, “You don’t need to know that stuff! it’ll only make you play with less FEEL! Famous guitar player X didn't know theory, so you don't need to know it either... Blah, blah, blah...”

My goal is to set the record straight and shed some light on some of this confusion.

Music theory is basically two things:

1. It is the spoken language of music. In other words, it’s a common set of terms and concepts that enable us as musicians to express musical ideas without necessarily having an instrument in-hand.
2. It is the mechanics of music. In other words, it is the examination of the relationships between musical tones, rhythm, and intermingled moments of silence, and how these work with and against each other.

Music theory is less about rules, more about observations.

Music theory is a broad and deep topic; it's so deep that you can focus on music theory as an entire college degree focus -- all the way up to the Ph.D. level! We're not going to go nearly that deep. The goal here is to get you to a conversational level of music theory so that you can be effective at communicating with your musician peers and collaborators. Hopefully this will also help you unlock a vault of knowledge that will also help you become a better musician or songwriter.

I'll see you next week with the first lesson!

Story Behind the Song: Kosmos

Greetings on this fine Wednesday!

Today marks the end of the Story Behind the Song series for my album Legacy. The final song is "Kosmos", the 13th and last track of the album.

The song "Kosmos" -- like several of my songs -- gets its title from my interest in astronomy. I envisioned this song as a soundtrack for a very high speed journey through our solar system and galaxy. Yes, this journey would have to be REALLY fast... faster than even theoretically possible. The song is less than 4 minutes and it takes light from our sun 8 minutes to reach the Earth, traveling at the speed of light. Our current understanding of physics doesn't allow for speeds faster than the speed of light, so yeah, I'm invoking my artistic license here. :-)

"Kosmos" was originally intended to be a duet for piano and cello, but as I got further along in writing the piano part, I decided to arrange the song for more of a rock ensemble (bass, drums, synthesizers, and eventually guitar). The song has two distinct sections. The beginning half has the more traditional sounding chord progressions and melodies, and I envisioned this as the part of the journey that takes place within our solar system -- it is our familiar home within the universe. The second half moves to a decidedly darker, more haunting modern harmony with a bit more of an unsettling melody. This part of the song represents the journey off into the largely uncharted deep space of the Milky Way and beyond.

The original recording of "Kosmos" focused on the piano, and there was no guitar part at all. Before I had even started the recording sessions for the Legacy album, I had picked out all of the songs that were to be included, and "Kosmos" was actually not on the list, because I had always approached it as a piano song, not a guitar song. As it turned out, one of my original choices -- a song titled "Sunset" -- was just not working. It was always kind of an odd song with a mishmash of different ideas thrown together, but the new recording of it made the incongruities even more apparent. I was on the verge of just chopping the album down to 12 songs, but I decided to try adding a guitar line to "Kosmos" to see if it would be a worthy replacement. I never would have guessed how well the guitar part worked with this song, and I had to kick myself for not opting to include "Kosmos" as a first-round pick.

For the new version of "Kosmos", aside from just adding on new guitar parts, I also improved the drums and bass guitar quite a bit. Those parts were functional, but pretty boring in the original.

I truly hope you've enjoyed this series of posts, and I encourage you to comment here or on my Facebook page if you have any questions or comments about any of my music.

I'll be taking the remainder of the week off for blog posts, but starting next week, I'll be trying out a new format for posts.

Also, if you haven't picked up your copy of Legacy yet, it's available on CD, digital download, iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon. The links to all of these are on my website: http://chrisstark.com and from now until June 30th, $1 from every album purchased will be donated to the THINK Fund, which helps provide educational and workforce experience opportunities to underserved students in Hawaii (where I live).

Story Behind the Song: Zero

Howdy Internet Peeps!

The song for today's installment of the "Story Behind the Song" is track number 12 from Legacy, entitled "Zero".

This song was initially intended to be included in the same student film project as my song "The Descent", but as I mentioned in that story behind the song, my involvement in the project ended before I could contribute the songs I had written.

While there are definite parallels in the style and sound between "The Descent" and "Zero", there was a bet behind "Zero"...

During the late 90s, I was pretty new to and unfamiliar with the industrial genre, although I did like what I had heard for the most part. This was a subset of electronic music that employed non-musical, cacophonous, percussive, and dissonant sound textures along with the more musical sounding synthesizers and other instruments. Some examples of industrial music artists would be Front Line Assembly, Skinny Puppy, and Ministry. Some friends who were also working on the student film bet me that "there was no way I could come up with a song in the industrial genre overnight".

The next day I brought them a rough mix of the new song I wrote that previous night: "Zero"

I won. 😎

I named the song "Zero" because so much of the industrial music I had heard up to that point seemed to revel in the ideals of nihilism, so because the word nihilism made me think of "nil" which means "zero", thus the title was born.

Much like "The Descent", I didn't make sweeping changes from the original version to the new version of "Zero". I added a bass guitar part, which had much the same effect in adding aggressive punchiness.

Trivia: I had to learn how to play the guitar riff from the bridge in reverse order so that when I recorded it then reversed it, the notes of the riff were in the right order but the sound of the guitar was in reverse. Now THAT was tricky!

Tomorrow will be the last entry for the story behind the song series for my album Legacy.

If you haven't already done so, you can buy your copy of my album Legacy from links on my website. It's available now on CD, digital download, iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon MP3. If you buy it between now and June 30th, $1 of your purchase price will be donated to The Hawaii Island New Knowledge Fund, which helps underrepresented students from Hawaii with educational and workforce development opportunities in STEM fields.

http://chrisstark.com

Story Behind the Song: Time Machine

Greetings Good People of Earth!

Welcome to the 11th installment of "Story Behind the Song" from my album Legacy. Today's song is titled "Time Machine".

The title "Time Machine" is actually another reference to astronomy. Telescopes by their very design enable us to peer into the distant past. The light we see from distant celestial bodies has taken hundreds, thousands, millions, or even billions of years to reach us. When it arrives, it paints a picture of how the universe looked all those many years ago. Telescopes are real life time machines.

When I wrote and recorded the first version of "Time Machine", I created a rough mix of the song, and then the unthinkable happened: my hard drive crashed and I lost the original project files. I have since learned my lesson and now keep two current backups of my data at all times, but the result at the time was that I had a mediocre mix of a song that I really liked, but I couldn't be completely proud of it because the mix wasn't right.

Trivia: "Time Machine" was actually the impetus behind the entire Legacy album. Ever since I lost the original project files, I had been wanting to recreate the song. The Legacy project came to be after I successfully recreated a rough new version of "Time Machine" from scratch. My newer studio equipment mixed with a bevy of newer and better guitars made even the experimental rough version of the song sound even better than the old version. This outcome inspired me to select an album's worth of my old songs and do a full-fledged, official public release.

In many ways, I consider "Time Machine" to be the benchmark of my sound as a guitarist and songwriter. The guitar solo on this song is my favorite guitar solo to date, and I really love the melodies throughout the entire song.

Story Behind the Song: Dreamtime

Greetings Awesome Citizens of Internetville!

In Hawaii, every Friday is Aloha Friday, so a warm ALOHA to you all!

Wrapping up this week's collection of daily installments of "Story Behind the Song" is track #10 from my album Legacy, "Dreamtime".

This song holds the distinction of being the quickest I've ever taken to write a song from start to finish. It all happened one evening while I was hanging out a friend's apartment. He had a similar studio setup, so I was noodling around with a few of his keyboards. We had a mutual friend arriving at the airport that evening, and I opted to stay back at the apartment while one friend went to pick up the other. In what was about 30-45 minutes, I came up with the entire song structure and melody for "Dreamtime", complete enough to show it off when they arrived.

There were not a huge number of changes from the old version of "Dreamtime" to the version on Legacy, but rather the song mostly benefitted from better recording and much better guitar playing.

When choosing the guitar to use for the Legacy recording session of this song,  I tried several of my guitars, but ultimately landed on my Ibanez S5521Q (pictured). In the intro section of the song, there is a sustained E that I play on the 9th fret of the G string, and on this guitar specifically, that particular E has a tendency to produce a very noticeable octave overtone that just sings when played through my Mesa Boogie amp. When I played that intro the first time on this instrument, it was clear that this was the perfect axe for this song.

Now as for the title "Dreamtime", I mentioned that I wrote the song on synthesizers, and this very first version of the song used a lot of bell-type sounds, resulting in the song reminding me of a lullaby. The song evolved away from the lullaby sound as I added bass, drums, and guitar, but the name stuck.

I hope you all enjoy your weekend!

I'll be back on Monday to continue with the stories behind the last few songs of the album.

If you haven't already done so, you can buy your copy of my album Legacy from links on my website. It's available now on CD, digital download, iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon MP3. If you buy it between now and June 30th, $1 of your purchase price will be donated to The Hawaii Island New Knowledge Fund, which helps underrepresented students from Hawaii with educational and workforce development opportunities in STEM fields.

http://chrisstark.com

Story Behind the Song: The Descent

Happy Thursday!

Today's song marks my first foray into the world of soundtrack composing. Track number 9 from my album Legacy is entitled "The Descent".

This song has its origins dating back to my undergraduate studies in music at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. During that time, several of my friends were in the communications & videography program and as their final project, they were working on a short film. The story was actually quite interesting -- imagine a very condensed, 15 minute version of "The Matrix" meets William Gibson's "Neuromancer". Both "The Descent" and "Zero" were intended to be used in this film.

The song gets its title from a scene in the movie where the protagonist connects his consciousness to the Internet and descends into it. Unfortunately, unforeseen circumstances left me unable to participate in the project, but I really liked what I had come up with. Ultimately, I was still able to use "The Descent" for my own final project, which I'm sure didn't sit well with our very conservative and very anti-pop/rock music department.

After graduating, I had an opportunity to submit "The Descent" to a contest for possible inclusion on the soundtrack for the 2000 Adam Sandler film "Little Nicky". The contest was held on the now-defunct Garage Band website (which existed several years before Apple's desktop music app). This site used a democratic, blind, A-B comparison voting system that allowed both members and the general public to listen to entries and vote A or B. There were about 1,900 entries by the final submission date, and by the final week of judging, "The Descent" had peaked at #9 but ultimately fell to #13 at the end of the contest. Only the top 10 finalists were considered for the soundtrack, so I didn't quite make it, but I still felt pretty good about that level of positive response.

Now in terms of what changed from the original version to this new version, there isn't a huge number of changes, but they are rather significant changes. The first change was the addition of bass guitar. Previously, the bass was handled by synthesizers. The bass guitar added an aggressive punchiness to the low-end of the song that I didn't even realize was missing. I also did a minor rewrite of the bridge section of the song. The original riff was too chaotic and didn't mesh well with the rest of the material.

The biggest change was the key change. When I originally wrote the song as a purely synthesizer song, it was in C minor. This didn't fit well on guitar, so on the first recorded version with guitar, I transposed the song up 4 semitones to E minor. The E minor version played nicely on guitar, but it wasn't as dark and heavy. So for the new version included on Legacy, I used my 7-string Jackson RR7R Flying V guitar, and I transposed it back down past C minor, all the way down to B minor, which fits perfectly on that low B of the 7-string guitar.

I'll have another "Story Behind the Song" for you tomorrow, then I'll be taking another break for the weekend. If you'd like to pick up a copy of my album Legacy, please visit http://chrisstark.com for links to buying an autographed CD, digital downloads, iTunes, Google Play, or Amazon MP3.

Story Behind the Song: Racing The Wind

Happy Wednesday, my fine fellow Internet denizens!

Today's "story behind the song" focuses on track number 8 from my album "Legacy", entitled "Racing The Wind".

This song hails from around 1997, but it was untitled for a couple years. One of the unique things about this song was that even though the mid-late 1990s was a period of time when I was writing a lot of synthesizer based music, this song was written on and intended to be played by guitar. On the earliest versions of the song, the verses were in a major key, but I wasn't as fond of the mood of the song -- it was a bit too sing-songy and happy-go-lucky. Very not me. When I switched it over to a minor key, it took on a classical-influenced melodic quality which better suited the song.

One day while I was driving on a stretch of freeway on Oahu that was uncharacteristically mostly empty (this was weird, even 20 years ago), I noticed that I was keeping pace with the rapid-moving shadows of clouds that were being cast onto the road. I felt like I was racing with the wind, and this song happened to be playing -- the title was born!

As with several of the songs on this album, one of my goals in re-arranging and re-recording the song was to make it more possible to perform the song using a standard band (i.e., having 20 keyboard players isn't normal). So as with many of the other songs on the album, for "Racing The Wind" this translated to combining or eliminating redundant synthesizer parts, and distilling the song down to its essential elements.

This song features a guitar solo where I decided to pull all the stops and just SHRED. The first attempts to recreate the guitar solo from the original version of the song just felt lifeless -- it was too stiff and structured. I felt like if we're really racing here, we gotta go FAST! 😎

That's the deep-dive on "Racing The Wind". Thanks for reading, and I'll see you tomorrow with the next installment of "story behind the song".

Story Behind the Song: Moonlight

Salutations, Awesome Internet Folks!

Happy Tuesday! Continuing with the daily "story behind the song" posts from my new album "Legacy", today's song is number 7 and the only song on the album I didn't write: "Moonlight".

"Moonlight" is my guitar arrangement of Beethoven's "Piano Sonata no. 14 in C#m, 2nd movement", better known as the "Moonlight Sonata". I grew up listening to my parents' classic rock collection on vinyl, but I also listened to a lot of classical music via my grandmother's 8-track and cassette collection. "Moonlight Sonata" has a dreamy, evocative quality that in my opinion sets it apart from the rest of Beethoven's works.

So even though "Moonlight" isn't my own piece, I still had an older version of my arrangement prior to this new version. The old version was a tad heavier on the synthesizers, and my guitar playing on the original version was very "straight", with little variation in my articulation and performance. There were also no drums or bass guitar in my old arrangement.

I had a couple of goals with the new version, aside from just adding in bass & drums. The first was to play with much more feeling and passion, using more interesting articulation techniques like string raking, bends, and vibrato. The second was to record the entire guitar melody in one take, start to finish. I accomplished both goals and I'm quite proud of the result.

Trivia: Beethoven never actually refered to his song as "Moonlight Sonata". This name was coined by a German music critic Ludwig Rellstab, several years after Beethoven's death.

Thanks for reading! See you all tomorrow!

Story Behind the Song: Orbit

Greetings Awesome Internet Citizens!

Happy Monday! I hope you all enjoyed your weekend! We're back and continuing with the daily "story behind the song" posts from my new album "Legacy". Picking up where we left off, we're now on track 6: "Orbit".

The name "Orbit" was influenced by my lifelong fascination with space and astronomy, and it also refers to the musical influences from this song coming from stops along an orbit around our own planet. This song features influences from the traditional music of West Africa and Southeast Asia, and also a dose of electronica and heavy metal.

The original version of "Orbit" was 100% synthesizer, like many of my songs. However, unlike some of my synthesizer songs, "Orbit" was written with guitar "consultation" -- I made sure that I could actually play the parts on guitar, even when it was a synth song. I'm weird like that.

One of the big changes from the original version to the new version was the layered, clean, West African-influenced guitar sequences. These lines were previously a mix of several synthesizer and sampled instruments. This new addition along with a dramatic reduction in synthesizer parts gives the new version of "Orbit" a unique and distinctly World Beat influenced sound.

Trivia: The guitar parts on "Orbit" were played almost entirely on my Gibson Les Paul (the one on the album cover), and it is the only song on the album that features the "clean" channel of my Mesa Boogie Mark 5:25 amplifier.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you back here tomorrow for the next song!

Story Behind the Song: I'll Be Waiting

Greetings Awesome Internet People!

Happy Aloha Friday from Hawaii! Continuing on with my daily "story behind the song" posts, and wrapping up for the week, we are at track number 5 from my album "Legacy", which is "I'll Be Waiting".

If you give "I'll Be Waiting" a casual listen, you'd probably think it's a pretty straight ahead guitar rock song. That's a reasonable assumption. However, when I wrote this song, I didn't even touch a guitar. All of the guitar that you hear in the song was originally synthesizers. Fortunately, I came to my senses and used the right tool for the job -- I never ended up recording the synthesizer version, as even my earliest demos of the song made it pretty clear that the melody belonged on guitar.

The name "I'll Be Waiting" refers to the feeling of being ready and waiting for when the person you love has finally decided to return to you. I was inspired by several of the Romantic Era British novels I was reading in the late 1990s, including Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights".

As the original version of this song was written all on synthesizers, the original arrangement was very densely packed with dozens of synthesizer parts. It made for an interesting soundscape, but ultimately, I felt like the thick arrangement did more to distract from the melody than to support it.

When it came time to redo "I'll Be Waiting" my goals were to make the arrangement much thinner, and to make the song even more of a guitar rock song. To that end, I got rid of the original intro section that was a swirling ambient synthesizer soundscape, and I replaced it with an AC/DC-influenced guitar riff, played on my wife's beautiful blue Ibanez guitar. All in all, I dramatically reduced the synth presence and focused on elements that supported the melodic components of the song.

Trivia: there is a repeating chord in every chorus that is literally the most dissonant and "wrong" chord I could have chosen. I did this on purpose to give the chorus a bit of an unsettling feeling -- and also just to see if I could do it without anyone noticing. 😈

So that's it for this week! I'll continue with the "story behind the song" posts next week.

Story Behind the Song: Marci

Happy Thursday, Awesome Internet People!

Today is installment #4 of my daily "story behind the song" postings. Today's song is named after and dedicated to my beautiful wife Marci.

As is rock tradition, this love song is a bit more of a ballad-tempo, and the intro to this song hints at the fact that even though I identify more with being a guitarist, I'm still a sucker for a nice piano part. In fact, the entire song blossomed out of this piano part in the intro.

When I wrote the original version of this song, it actually had no melody -- it was more of a U2-style long echo-y texture on guitar, but over the same chord changes that you hear in the new version. It was pretty and the texture was nice, but I never really felt like it conveyed what I really felt. The original also had kind of an obnoxious and out-of-place funky slapped bass guitar track. I replaced that with a more appropriate long, sustained bass guitar part.

With the new version, I stripped down the arrangement a bit so that it was really just a couple keyboard parts (i.e., humanly playable by one person), bass guitar, and drums as a foundation. As with "Spheres", since I didn't have a melody set in stone yet, I mixed a version of this "naked" version of the song so that I could improvise melodic ideas until I found "the right one". Unlike "Spheres", the melody for "Marci" came to me much easier -- I think having such an inspirational mate/love/companion/spouse/friend/all-of-the-above-and-more made the melody flow from my guitar organically.

One hold over from the original is the "epic" guitar solo. While the original had little in the way of melody for either of the verses or choruses, it did have this guitar solo which I felt was quite melodic, and fit the chord changes very nicely.

A bit of trivia: the guitar noodling at the ending of "Marci" features the only real "one-take", "off-the-cuff" improvisation on the whole album. I didn't plan a single note of it; we just hit record and I played.

So that's the story of my ode to my Marci 💕❤️💕.

I'll have one more song for you all tomorrow, and I'll take a break for the weekend.

Story Behind the Song: Ethereal

Happy Wednesday!

Moving right along with the daily "story behind the song" posts, today's song is track number 3, "Ethereal".

I've heard it said that, "Inside every guitar, there is a song waiting to get out". I have certainly found this to be true, and it's not limited to the guitar. Back in the late 90s/early 00s, I had read that one of my favorite electronic musicians, William Orbit, considered the Roland Juno-106 to be his favorite synthesizer. As luck would have it, I managed to find a used one at a musicians' swap meet, in near perfect condition.

The cool thing about this instrument is that all of the sound synthesis parameters are accessible on the instrument's front panel in the form of knobs, switches, and sliders. This makes the process of making and tweaking sounds very interactive and fun. So for "Ethereal" the synthesizer parts in the intro of the song were the result of my playing around on the Juno 106. My fiddling around eventually worked its way into a song.

The name "Ethereal" is perhaps a strange choice for this song, seeing as it has a rather sharp juxtaposition of ethereal sounding synthesizer parts (hint: that's where the name came from) and biting harsh heavy guitars, bass, and drums. However, being that it was the synthesizer parts that really pulled the song out of the ether, the name stuck, as a tribute to that awesome Juno 106 synthesizer.

For the new version of "Ethereal", one of the biggest differences between the old and new versions was the addition of bass guitar. The original only had squishy synthesizer bass lines (which are still there), but the bass guitar doubling what the synth bass is doing added an aggressive but sharper focus and tightness to the low end of the song. Also, the guitar parts are much more focused, and this is actually a result of turning down the gain on my amplifier quite a bit. It's still got that aggressive metal tone, but the guitars are much tighter and more focused.

The song "Ethereal", along with "Zero" and "The Descent" are the 3 songs from the album with no melodic guitar parts to speak of. I struggled a little with the decision to include these, but ultimately decided in their favor because they represent my lifelong love of both synthesizers and guitars, and the fusion between heavy rock and electronica. The 3 of these songs represent a chapter in my music career when I was very focused on soundtrack work. Excerpts from the old version of "Ethereal" can be heard in the 2006 documentary, "What It Takes: A Documentary About 4 World Class Triathletes' Quest for Greatness".

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0905644/

It's a pretty cool documentary, and they used my music very tastefully.

And that's the story of "Ethereal"! Please post any questions or comments!

I'll see you tomorrow with the next song from the album!

Story Behind the Song: Daydream

Happy Tuesday everyone!

My album "Legacy" is available now on CD, high-resolution digital download, and MP3 from iTunes, Google, and Amazon. Check out my website for links to buying your copy today!

http://chrisstark.com/

So I'm continuing with the daily "story behind the song" for each of my songs on the album. Yesterday's song was "Spheres", the first track from the album, and today's track, going in album order, is song #2, "Daydream".

My song "Daydream" is one of the oldest songs in my catalog. The first versions of this song started to take shape as early as 20 years ago. Back at that time, I was finishing up college and I only had a couple of instruments, and in a sense, that limitation helped me to focus on the melody of the song.

For the longest time, this song had no title; it was just a simple groove with the verse melody. The chorus and bridge eventually came to me, but I still didn't have a good title. Often times, when I'm trying to name a song, I'll listen to it and daydream, and this is what I did. Instead of coming up with a title via my daydreaming, it occurred to me that the very act of daydreaming itself was a perfect theme for this tune.

The original version of "Daydream" had no guitar at all -- another 100% synthesizer song. However, a year or two after recording the original version, I had a chance to perform it at the Honolulu Academy of Arts theatre with my good friend, multi-instrumentalist and composer Stephen Fox, along with an ensemble of amazing musicians including Taiko drum master Kenny Endo, Guinean Balafon master Lansana Kouyaté, and saxophonist Randy Wheeler. Among an impressively varied array of compositions by Stephen and the other musicians, Stephen & I arranged this song and a couple others of mine with guitar, violin, and soprano sax carrying the melodic parts. This event helped cement in my mind the importance of a strong melody and the willingness to be flexible with one's own vision of their music.

I always loved the melody from "Daydream", so this song was actually the first from this album project that I transcribed for guitar and also the first to be recorded. My first draft of the new version had an extended guitar solo, and I really hated how it sounded. It was indulgent and unnecessary. It distracted from the carefree simplicity of the melody, so I got rid of it entirely and replaced it with a very short, subdued bridge motif that leads into the final chorus. I felt like it worked a whole lot better.

Some might be surprised that this song isn't overly virtuosic or "shreddy", but I figured this song is all about the melody, and anything that gets in the way of that is the wrong choice. Daydreaming at its best is light, fun, relaxing, and simple, so I wanted this song to reflect that.

So there you have it, my groovy little song devoted to daydreaming! 😊

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you again tomorrow with another song!

Story Behind the Song: Spheres

Happy Monday Everyone!

My album "Legacy" is available now on CD, high-resolution digital download, and MP3 from iTunes, Google, and Amazon. Check out my website for links to buying your copy today!

http://chrisstark.com/

Starting today, I'm going to post a daily "story behind the song" for each of my songs on the album. I'll be giving you the insights into what inspired the song, why I gave the song its title, some of my anecdotes from the recording sessions, and maybe a little more.

As I've mentioned previously, "Legacy" is a collection of songs that I had written about 15 years ago. Some of my closest family and friends have likely heard versions of these songs over the years, but this collection is the first "official" release of my music that I've made available to the general public. The songs on "Legacy" are a complete re-working of all of these old songs: new arrangements, new recordings, new interpretations. So even if you've heard the old songs before, you've never heard them like this!

Today's track: "Spheres"

I've had a near-lifelong love affair with astronomy, space, and the cosmos. The name "Spheres" was a reference to the major celestial objects in our solar system -- the Sun, planets, and moons. I envisioned "Spheres" as the soundtrack to a journey through our solar system, and I think the new version still holds onto that original vision.

When I first wrote "Spheres", I was listening to a lot of very synthesizer-oriented music, like Tangerine Dream, Crystal Method, Jan Hammer, Depeche Mode, and much more, and my home studio was dominated by over 20 synthesizers! 

The first version of "Spheres" was 100% synthesizer, and it was a lush, layered orchestration of over 30 different individual synthesizer parts. One technique I learned in my orchestration and arrangement courses in college -- and a practice perfected by Tangerine Dream -- was the doubling or tripling of individual melodic lines using a wide variety of sounds. The result was a unique and highly complex timbre. "Spheres" was full of these lines. The harmony & song structure of "Spheres" was always one of my favorites from my cache of old songs, as it weaved in and out of several keys, but always managed to stay cohesive.

With the new version of "Spheres", I started with nothing more than a skeletal structure of the the song and the bass line. I always liked the bass guitar part from the original version, and that's quite literally the only hold over from the original version that made it to the new version without significant changes. Building on the bass line and entirely new drum parts, I gradually added bits and pieces for the old synthesizer parts, but I did so very sparingly. My intention was to create a backdrop of drums, bass, and synths that could be reasonably played by an actual band -- without requiring 20 guest synth players. 😝

The final piece of the puzzle was the guitar parts. This took weeks. The original song had no guitar at all, and for that matter, it really wasn't a terribly melodic song. I ended up creating a rough mix of the song with just the bass, drums, and synth parts, and every day I spent some time improvising and noodling around over the chord changes. I was almost to the point of abandoning the song because everything I was doing seemed to not fit very well. 

It was finally the day I had set aside for recording the guitar parts, and I felt like I was coming into the studio empty-handed. As I was warming up, I decided to play along with the backing tracks, and BOOM!!! It happened. The verse melody, the intro, the crazy guitar solo parts... they just seemed to fall out of my guitar. We quickly went into recording mode and captured what I was doing, and some of what you hear on the album are my first takes. It was as if something switched a light on in my head.

The guitar tracks for "Spheres" were pretty much the last guitar tracks I recorded for the album. As I was starting the mixing and mastering phases, those big, powerful guitar chords that start the song out just begged for the song to be track #1 for the album.

So long story short, "Spheres" went from a song that was almost on the chopping block to the song that would end up leading the charge and opening the album.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments about "Spheres".