Coming Home — My First Solo Release

For a long time I had the belief that I don’t know enough yet to write/compose songs.

Let’s learn the lydian b7 scale first or get that com­pli­cated polyrhythm down. Then I’m ready to start writ­ing good material.

Of course, after the lydian b7 scale or the polyrhythm some­thing else reared its ugly head.

Only in col­lege, due to the required arrang­ing and com­pos­ing assign­ments for my Bachelor’s degree that lim­ited belief slowly dis­solved. I real­ized that for any­thing you want to mas­ter, you bet­ter get going and actu­ally do the stuff. No need to wait for con­di­tions to be per­fect or to first get all your ducks in row.

Trust me, con­di­tions are never per­fect. And leave the poor ducks alone.

I think you get the idea.

Seriously...

Anonymous or Group Projects

One of my projects was per­formed in the pres­ti­gious Haydn Hall at the Esterhazy Palace in Eisenstadt.

I’ve pro­duced music for the biggest Austrian TV sta­tion. It’s cool to turn on the TV and watch the down­hill race in Kitzbühel (prob­a­bly the most impor­tant ski event week­end out­side the Olympics or World Championships) and hear your own tracks in the back­ground dur­ing slow motion analy­sis or commentary.

My tracks, sold as stock music, have been used in promo videos and var­i­ous other sim­i­lar projects.

All that’s great.

However, it’s always been either anony­mous or sim­ply as part of a group or a side project.

Not any­more.

I’ve signed with Decksharks Records and “Coming Home” is my first release with them.

Coming Home

Initially, dur­ing a prac­tice ses­sion I came up with this Rhodes comp­ing pat­tern that I liked. I quickly pro­grammed a light drum and per­cus­sion groove and by chance stum­bled upon some Uillean pipe phrase sam­ples that with­out any pitch correction/transposing fit the key and tempo.

Immediately the vamp had a cozy Irish kinda feel and I knew I had the core of a good track.

Several ses­sions and re-workings later I decided to ditch the Uillean pipes, because I got tired of hear­ing the same few sam­ple phrases and they were too Irish.

I wanted the feel to be more uni­ver­sal — to cap­ture the slightly sen­ti­men­tal, melan­choly mood of leav­ing a place you really liked while being joy­ful in antic­i­pa­tion of return­ing home.

The Video

For the video I first col­lected mostly beau­ti­ful land­scapes of green mead­ows and grassy hills.

It turned out rather dull and boring.

Then I expanded it to show the jour­ney from a crowded city to some unknown uniden­ti­fi­able pas­toral land­scape. I plas­tered together cityscapes from New York and pic­tures of traf­fic jams with the landscapes.

Better, but still not right.

My girl­friend finally tied the loose ends together and sug­gested I’d take the title lit­er­ally and focus on the com­ing home part. No New York or other big metro­pole — Los Angeles, where I’ve lived for almost 7 years, instead.

No coastal pic­tures or Rocky Mountains — pic­tures of Austrian land­scapes instead.

A more per­son­ally related story for the video.

What a con­cept — duh!

The Cheat

I have to admit, I still couldn’t help it and cheated a lit­tle bit. The frog per­spec­tive sky­scraper pic with the clouded dark blue sky is a New York picture.

The air­port pho­tos are from all over the world — Venezuela, Amsterdam, Germany, some Asian airport.

The land­scapes are not all Austrian — 1 or 2 of the sum­mer wheat fields are in France. But hey, at least there are no sea coasts in the video any­more and all the land­scapes actu­ally COULD be in Austria.

Sometimes you just have to com­pro­mise and go with what fits the bill, espe­cially when using freely avail­able stock photography.

It’s the idea that counts, right?

Buy the Song

I hope you’ve enjoyed the video and in case you’d like to get your hands on the song, head on over to:

Junodownload

Beatport

More songs (and videos) are on the way and will be posted here. Any feed­back is highly wel­come, of course.

No related posts.

Tagged with: Austria • Composing • landscapes • Los Angeles • New York • photography • songwriting • stock music • video

Filed under: Music

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and never miss an update!