Austin, TX
I’ve been working on this, on and off, for almost a month so I thought I’d share my progress before I put it away for a while. It’s a cover of Genesis’ “Afterglow”, one of their more lush and romantic songs, pure Tony Banks. It builds up to this huge ending, so it was their closer for live shows for over a decade. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s the original:
It’s sort of a go-to for me to play on piano since it’s both easy (a must for me) and, I think, quite beautiful. One night, I think Nicole was at work, I was just playing it very slowly, with one chord per bar and no movement beyond that. I thought “Huh. This would make a really nice, sparse, glitchy, electronic thing and I bet I could do that.”
So that’s what I’ve been doing.
The performance of the parts was actually pretty straightforward. I know the song pretty well, and I had a clear idea of what I wanted. All of the chords hitting on the first beat a piano, albeit piano being clobbered by weird delays and stuff. The parts that were originally guitar parts are very thin synths. I did add a couple of real guitar tracks (only one is recognizable, I think), the rest is all synths and effects.
Here’s what I have so far:
I’m putting it away for a while because I’ve been messing with it for so long that I’m not really hearing it anymore. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to rip a lot of it out because it’s busier than I really want it to be, but I’m not sure what to remove. It’s not quite as “minimalist” as I’d like, but it’s not too far off, I don’t think.
So, this is anywhere from 70-90% done, depending on what I decide to change when I come back in a couple of months. It’s…not quite what I imagined when I got started, but it’s a good deal closer than I thought I’d be able to get, if that makes any sense. If you’re in to this sort of thing, enjoy! If not, then….endure?
-RK
P.S. The mix is stereo, but I’ll be honest, there’s a lot of guesswork involved as I am functionally deaf in one ear. The meters say there’s some interesting separation, but I have to take their word for it.