Ardor

This tune is about that time at the end of a good day when you’re dropping off to sleep, feeling generally well disposed and thinking about how lucky you are to have the people you love. This is a reprise of another song; I wrote two quite different arrangements to the main melody and they branched off into their own separate things.

The bass part was inspired by The Moon And I by Steve Vai, which is an otherwise languid piece contrasted by a very up front, insistent bassline which somehow works perfectly. The rest of the arrangement sits in sort of a mid-point between Parachute by Covet, and Joe Satriani’s Flying in a Blue Dream. Covet is usually a bit too math-rock for me to vibe with, but here they cut a lot of the excess and deliver a masterclass in being dynamic without needing to be loud. Both Parachute and Flying… are based heavily around the rhythm guitar playing suspended arpeggios while the bass defines the harmony.

Recording wise this is purely the built-in plugins from Logic Studio; I often use them for tracking since they are pretty lightweight and then switch out for something with higher fidelity. In this case, though, everything somehow sounded surprisingly good together with basically no mixing required, so I decided not to mess with it. The rhythm guitar is my Solar 8-string; the extended scale in standard tuning sounds really great for clean arpeggios, especially with the compensation for pitch and intonation provided by the Evertune bridge. Leads are a combination of the Solar and the JEM.

I’ll put up the other part next time.