Saturday, August 31, 2013

Rolling Thunder/Baby's Breath

Original Banjo Music

I recently released a video showcasing two of my songs, Rolling Thunder and Baby's Breath. These are both original songs that I wrote and thought that they just might complement each other, so I recorded both and combined them into one video. You can find the link to the video in the Downloads and Links section below.

Videography

Creating videos is something that is fairly new to me, but I'm finding it to be a new diversion that I find quite enjoyable; however, it's also time consuming and requires a bit of new found creativity and most of all the willingness to learn new techniques and the tools necessary to achieve the end product. 

For this particular video I employed the use of what is now known as the Ken Burns effect. This is basically the effect of panning and zooming a still image in video to give the illusion of motion. I believe that one of its intents is to draw attention to a particular subject in the still image.

I also learned the technique of taking a still image and turning it into a cartoon. This comes in handy when I'm the actor as I feel that I don't have to worry about the details as much when I'm represented as a cartoon.

Rolling Thunder

This song was written using typical Scruggs patterns that one find in most bluegrass banjo tunes. The overall sound conveyed touches on some classical tones using full banjo rolls with those few exceptions towards the end of the song where I use full on bluegrass banjo fill licks to complement the descending line. Take a look at the tab below. This example is played near the end of the song.


Baby's Breath

Baby's Breath is a completely different animal than Rolling Thunder. This is especially true in regards to technique and chord structure. Although I classify both songs as contemporary pieces, Baby's Breath uses a variety of interesting chords and there are quite a few meter changes between 4/4 and 3/4 in the last half of the song.

Regarding the interesting chords, Baby's Breath begins with a Gmaj7 and descends over the next two bars to finally land on a D. Take a look at the banjo tab excerpt below from the beginning of the song. This gives it a cool jazzy sound that ends with a D major chord and notes with long sustain.


Anyway, I hope you enjoy the video and the music, and I appreciate you giving it a listen.

Downloads and Links

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