I’m excited about the new album “Passing Through The Portal”, as this album brings to fruition better quality mixing techniques, that I believe delivers a better quality mix from my previous albums, and continues the further development of an experimental composition style that I like to call “neo-classical fusion”. This style, in my mind, is a blend between jazz instrumentals, jazz chord progressions, modern rhythmic elements, and swelling soundtrack ideas.
The violin has been a somewhat neglected instrument in modern popular music, as the methods of constructing songs by taking lyrics and common chord progression patterns and then “jamming” into a useable tune will stymie most lyrical instrumentalists. This is because the vocal tracks will almost always take precedence over any other lyrical or melodic instruments, and in short three minute song forms, this usually only leaves room for some quick licks from the guitarists. In competition with the guitar and violin for those licks, the guitarist will usually win. Nashville style songs will allow the violin to sneak in a few licks, but the violin usually does not contribute much to the overall melodic development.
In any event, I’m trying to give voice to the modern electric-violin style while blending with synthesizer sounds. I have always loved the synthesizer, but have rejected the mediocre “string” sounds. What I’m searching for is the proper blending of the “natural string instrument” sound and the synthesized string sounds. This will hopefully be the accepted level of quality for the future; I believe the blending of analog and digital instrumentation will give us some more energetic and interesting music. I would like to hear this from more natural/traditional instrumentalists as well.
I’m always looking for collaborators, so if you are willing to jump into a composition project, or even a remix project offered by Indaba Music, then please go to www.indabamusic.com and join me in an online collaboration project!
April 18, 2012
Categories: new original compositions . Tags: electric-violin, fusion, soundtrack, violin . Author: KevanPaul . Comments: No Comments
The new album “Going Home” was published by Jamendo today. This is my second solo composition album submitted to Jamendo and I hope to produce more. I have learned a lot about recording techniques and virtual instruments in the last nine months and have gone from using a MacPro notebook G4 Power-PC chipset machine to a recently acquired iMAC with the Intel chipset. The iMAC has already been a great blessing to me for finishing this album, and will give me more flexibility in the recording and editing process. I’m very excited about the ability to directly edit some of the complex Analog-to-MIDI translations that I was attempting to use previously. The last piece on the “Going Home” album is the only song that I recorded and arranged on the iMAC, and I would not have been able to finish this song on the MacPro notebook; it just did not have enough CPU and memory to keep up with my musical expectations. I’m glad to share this on Jamendo and hope that others will enjoy the music as much as I have trying to create it.
July 14, 2009
Categories: Uncategorized . Tags: new Jamendo album . Author: KevanPaul . Comments: No Comments
This new song has all of the jazz fusion elements that I want to hear in my compositions: 1. violin melodies with song form. “Verse – Verse – Break improvisation – Transition – Verse – Verse” 2. electronic rhythmic contrast parts 3. electric-violin solo that sounds like an electric-guitar solo (during transition) 4. vocal overlay with ambient choral effect. 5. jazz elements for violin phrases. The themes are stated, extended, and then repeated, with jazz improvisation in the middle section. 6. syncopated bass parts. If I can have these elements in each song on the “Going Home” album, then the collection should sound coherent and easy to follow. Hopefully, I can extend this framework to the next group of songs. Enjoy!
Watch the video below – the Viddler Word Press code is broken on Jamendo!
Music-Video-Clip
March 16, 2009
Categories: new original compositions . Tags: electric-violin, fusion, jazz, violin . Author: KevanPaul . Comments: 1 Comment
