Music: "Cloudy Night"

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

As I mentioned in my last post, my schedule has been a bit hectic lately.  So I haven't done a lot of new recording -- at least nothing has been completed, although I have a few things I've been playing around with.

But because I want to continue to make recurring posts of my music, how about I continue with my previous music post where I talked about wikiloops and offer you the first thing I ever uploaded there?  I called it  "Cloudy Night" because, in an amazing coincidence, I recorded it at night, and it was cloudy.  Brilliantly creative naming, don't you think?

I invite you to listen to it here:  "Cloudy Night"

I found the underlying bass and drum track when I searched for things to use as the foundation tracks for my guitar playing -- which is what led me to wikiloops in the first place.  The bass and drums in this has that spacy, funky, jazzy loose jam feel that appeals to me, and the odd time signature makes it especially fun.  It says "9/8" as the meter, but it feels much more like 6/8 to me.  The drums are by "Baer" and the bass is by wikiloops creator "Dick", and I think it highlights some very tasty playing. Dick called his track "Groove through the Storm" -- that's probably what inspired my title.  It wasn't stormy, but at least it was cloudy...

As the very first track I recorded and uploaded for wikiloops, there are some things I notice in "Cloudy night" that I would now do differently, even though it's only been about a month and a half since I did this piece.  For one thing, the overall sound level is a bit low since I was still learning how to make a mix in Reaper.  Also, I wanted to record this as close to a live "jam" as possible, and so what you hear is my first live take after running through it a few times to learn the structure.  Now I'm a little pickier -- I still like to get as close to "live" as possible, but I have no problem making several passes at something and then picking the best version, or even blending two or more takes together, as long as it's clear there's a switch between takes.

In this piece, I think my playing is fairly decent overall, and I like some parts especially, but there are also a couple of places where the notes are a bit sour and the phrasing is a little weak. I don't know if I'll ever get to the point where I'll edit and massage a track to cover individual notes -- that just feels like cheating, but I would probably redo this take if I were to record it now.

But hey, it's done, and so this is the version that will live on wikiloops for as long as their servers exist.

Thanks for listening!