It's that time! Well, it's been that time. Here we are. I'm E Stew and I have officially tracked out the guitars for this project. These photos taken while in progress. I really get into the zone when I work on my music, so for me to go out of my way to take these photos is a new thing. I wanted to share the moments.
What it's really like for me, is managing the string muting on the new ones. Very clean, none of the squeaking between changes, and also the other strings really want to ring. I'm playing around them, string skipping too. Some of these songs have moved around from guitar to piano, and back to guitar. Well, I take that back, they all are planned for piano. Right now only "Cloud" has the piano tracked for it. The clean guitar and piano chords are so very nice on the ears, especially these chords! I went to great lengths to find the voicings for these, where they sound like clouds. They float around too.
You may have noticed that I rethemed the site with clouds this year. I'm trying to bring you some of that essence.
I found the cloud chord a long time ago, I was inspired by a cloud I saw when hiking on Buttermilk mountain. It was so beautiful and rose to see me that day, but I was feeling terrible about what was happening in my current situation. That situation long has passed, but I never forgot that cloud. The 7-string guitar allows new chords to arise from over the low B. These are very openly spaced and stack up to 9 chords and beyond at times. "Not Very Far Now" actually briefly has an A13 that's created by the vocal melody. The chord underneath is stacked up to a 9 already. I'll openly admit, that I'll skip voicing the fifth of the chord sometimes on these. Totally allowed in my book! And your local music theory professor as well.
There are five full-length tracks on this EP. So, what I did is just make all five songs so good, they could all easily be singles on their own. You're gonna get five singles, basically. I figure, why waste the space? You don't wanna listen to all the extra filler anyway. Only one of those is about some clouds, each one has its own theme; "Graves Hill," or "Festival," or even "Summer Day," not to mention "Not Very Far Now."
