The Yellow Rose In The Snow -- prog album

Community Made With Ardour
#1

Hello everyone

I’ve just released my first album. It was produced entirely in Ardour: all seven tracks were recorded in Ardour 8 and mastered in A9; mixing was in A8 for all except the final track.

ETA: hmm, can’t seem to get the Bandcamp embedding to work, so here’s a link:
The Yellow Rose In The Snow

A8 completely changed my workflow, due to tempo-mapping. For all the pieces, a free-form piano guide track was recorded, tempo-mapped to the guide and then everything was recorded to the guide/variable click. This allows the pieces to ebb and flow naturally, to breathe, which I feel is a significant improvement over doing things to the grid, even with tempo ramps.

Monitor mixes were invaluable during vocal tracking and the analysis feature has been incredibly useful during the mastering/exporting phase.

The music is progressive rock, complete with melodic guitars, analogue synths, Mellotron, odd time signatures and interesting musical modes. It was done as a challenge: write and record a short piece (a prog vignette or prognette, if you will!) every two months over the course of a year. There were other creative limitations: in instrumentation; each piece had to be in a specific odd time signature; and each had to be in one of the modes of the melodic minor scale. There isn’t a concept – beyond the unifying limitations from the challenge – though the pieces were influenced by the seasons in which they were written, so that became an unofficial theme throughout the album.

The eagle-eyed might spot that there are seven pieces but only 12 months in a year, not 14! During the final two months one thing led to another and lyrics came into being, which was something of a surprise! Justice couldn’t be done to the words within the constraints of the challenge (i.e. Superlocrian in 13/8 time!), so a bonus seventh piece was added to the project to allow it to be developed unfettered by the limitations of the original challenge. The development and recording of the song severely extended the time it took to finish the album, but here it finally is.

It’s been a long, slow, tiring process but ultimately satisfying and fun. I hope you enjoy it!

4 Likes
#2

Great project! I love foot bass like “Hardin and York”

#3

Thanks for listening and commenting! I’ve not come across Hardin and York before, I must try to find some of their stuff. I’m not sure what you mean by “foot bass”, what is that?

#4

Bass played with the foot, e.g. with the Hammond organ;)

#5

Or the Moog Taurus, a staple of classic prog rock bands.

image

Cheers,

Keith

1 Like
#6

Ah, I wondered if it was something like that you were referring to :slight_smile: I think I’ve only ever heard it described as pedal bass, or bass pedals when referring to something like a Taurus.

There’s no actual Hammond pedals, or Taurus for that matter, but I did use other keyboards to fill out the low end in place – I love that sound too :grinning:

#7

I wondered if that was what was being alluded to, I’ve just never heard the term foot bass before though it makes perfect sense! I’m always partial to a Taurus-like sound at the climax of a piece, though I always use a regular analogue keyboard synth for that sort of sound rather than dedicated hardware. For two of the tracks it was an actual Moog, a Sub 37, whereas the other was the double-bass sound on my Solina.