I was hoping to have this done for the actual solstice, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be—mostly because I slacked off until after the last minute, i.e. I didn’t start the final engineering until Saturday. Working obsessively over the weekend, I finished in time for Christmas, so I still think it’s topical.

Regular readers may recall that back in October, as I was reposting my old music online, that I set a goal of writing one new song before the end of the year. That’s right: nothing like arbitrary deadlines to practice procrastination. It worked, though. Here’s a song.

“Nothing like arbitrary deadlines to practice procrastination.”

Firstly, I got a new toy. It’s a great and inexpensive MIDI keyboard with assignable faders and pots. Even though this is well-understood technology, and nothing new, it’s still new to me, and I find it incredibly cool. I composed the majority of this song using it—which is harder than it sounds, because it’s so much more fun to just dick around with all the settings but not actually record anything. That’s the curse of gadgetry, for you.

Also, this is the first song I’ve written almost exclusively by playing it into the computer. Of course, my own internal metronome is approximately on the beat the way shooting an arrow at a target and hitting the Earth is approximately on the bullseye, so I make liberal use of note quantization.

I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try and write a winter-ey type song. Not holiday, exactly. Holiday music becomes insufferable three hours before the holidays start. I wanted something more like Sleigh Ride (usurped as it has been for holiday music—it’s not!) which is topical, winter long. As I started to play around in Reason, I found a few patches that reminded me very much of Mannheim Steamroller, so I went with that. I really like Mannheim Steamroller, too, so that was a lot of fun. Additionally, it has some orchestra-techno mix, which I’m liking quite a bit, and a bit of theremin at the end there, too. It was really hard to record the theremin part under pressure (as always), so I put a lot of effects on it to make it sound not-terrible.

Everything considered, I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out.

A Very Electro Solstice (3.7mb)

Happy holidays to all, whichever you celebrate.

-Ted