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".