'eavy Metal!
Aug. 22nd, 2008 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellyssianJust for fun, I pulled out the chart for Fantasia Macabre i: Root of Chaos.
I'll back up a bit.
In the beginning, there was guitar, and it was good. Okay, okay, fine... I'll skip forward a bit...
Back on a quiet night in 1989 or so, I sat around with the other lead guitarist in the band, and, over the course of maybe 8 or 10 hours, Marshall and I played and wrote and thus the music for Fantasia Macabre. Over the next five years or so, the song would grow, shifting here and there, but with much of the original music remaining, until it reached a mostly-final point when I was back playing with Marshall again.
The song.
It's seven songs, really.
i. Root of Chaos, ii. Above & Below, iii. Through the Looking Glass, iv. The Diary, v. Imprisonment & Reflection, vi. Nothing to Fear, and vii. The Avatar 2:42
Artie had vocals worked out for the first three parts, although we had played a bit with the rest.
I suppose I can go back a bit further: I wrote the lyrics at an earlier time - I'm going to hunt them down and post them, I think. I don't even have the dates noted on this computer.
Anywho, back to the chart and earlier tonight.
I started to play through it. To be honest, the last bunch of times I'd tried, over the last decade or so, I was no longer physically capable of playing the Prelude and remainder of i. Root of Chaos. It's just too damn fast, too many twists and turns, and it needs to be Just Right or it all falls apart. I was amazed that it started to come together, probably better than I had played it back then.
Even the descending scalar run just worked.
So I called![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aequitaslevitas upstairs. Earlier in the day I had been doing my level best to get him to play a simple blues beat - and the lack of metronomic timing and the abundance of groove had him all in knots. This piece, however fast it might be, is not supposed to be so much a thing of feel but of dead-on technical accuracy.
In short, four of the eleven components of i. Root of Chaos now have piano parts.
Including the descending run.
And damn, does it sound cool.
For those of you who couldn't hear it (which is everyone exceptaequitaslevitas and meself!), think of some of the heavier, driving piano parts from Wojciech Kilar's score
for Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula
soundtrack, add guitar work in the same vein as Fates Warning's Spectre Within
, and you'll be as close as you can get without hearing the exact melodies. =)
Even better listen to the first 10-20 seconds of Vampire Hunters
and Pirates Of the Underground
and you'll get the idea (although truth be told, neither Marshall nor I have ever worked out our solos for the tune, so it's just the underlying guitar part).
I'll back up a bit.
In the beginning, there was guitar, and it was good. Okay, okay, fine... I'll skip forward a bit...
Back on a quiet night in 1989 or so, I sat around with the other lead guitarist in the band, and, over the course of maybe 8 or 10 hours, Marshall and I played and wrote and thus the music for Fantasia Macabre. Over the next five years or so, the song would grow, shifting here and there, but with much of the original music remaining, until it reached a mostly-final point when I was back playing with Marshall again.
The song.
It's seven songs, really.
i. Root of Chaos, ii. Above & Below, iii. Through the Looking Glass, iv. The Diary, v. Imprisonment & Reflection, vi. Nothing to Fear, and vii. The Avatar 2:42
Artie had vocals worked out for the first three parts, although we had played a bit with the rest.
I suppose I can go back a bit further: I wrote the lyrics at an earlier time - I'm going to hunt them down and post them, I think. I don't even have the dates noted on this computer.
Anywho, back to the chart and earlier tonight.
I started to play through it. To be honest, the last bunch of times I'd tried, over the last decade or so, I was no longer physically capable of playing the Prelude and remainder of i. Root of Chaos. It's just too damn fast, too many twists and turns, and it needs to be Just Right or it all falls apart. I was amazed that it started to come together, probably better than I had played it back then.
Even the descending scalar run just worked.
So I called
aequitaslevitas upstairs. Earlier in the day I had been doing my level best to get him to play a simple blues beat - and the lack of metronomic timing and the abundance of groove had him all in knots. This piece, however fast it might be, is not supposed to be so much a thing of feel but of dead-on technical accuracy.In short, four of the eleven components of i. Root of Chaos now have piano parts.
Including the descending run.
And damn, does it sound cool.
For those of you who couldn't hear it (which is everyone except
aequitaslevitas and meself!), think of some of the heavier, driving piano parts from Wojciech Kilar's score for Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula soundtrack, add guitar work in the same vein as Fates Warning's Spectre Within, and you'll be as close as you can get without hearing the exact melodies. =)Even better listen to the first 10-20 seconds of Vampire Hunters
and Pirates Of the Underground and you'll get the idea (although truth be told, neither Marshall nor I have ever worked out our solos for the tune, so it's just the underlying guitar part).