ok, this is the plain old unstructured progressive orchestral stuff by me.
Some unusual elements, however:
there is a quite evident reference to folk music, and some of you may also recognize some inspiration by classical composer Vivaldi.
About the meaning: I wanted to reproduce the everchanging and sometimes brute force of incoming Spring, with its sudden changes, great days of mild temperatures, but above all with its agitation.
This is no surprise, since progressive music has its major roots into folk and classical, and the title “Ultimavera” recalls Vivaldi’s “Primavera” (Spring in italian), the famous composition from his “Four seasons” (“Prima” in italian means “First”, while “Ultima” means “Last”, both in female gender).
This song, because of its huge size in memory and patterns, could have never been finished without RAM upgrade and HyperThreading Windows support removal, so let me thank Google for allowing me to find how to disable HT
Nice addition to the It-Alien omnibus. You’re really getting deeper into a ‘characterist sound’ with this, but also loosing some of your standard transition methods. In particular I love the use of gating the cymbals and chopping the movements with sharper silence.
Some of the guitar funk bits toward the middle end are a little brittle and stumbing for my liking, but the rest is very good. It’s not as doomy as previous works, the darker melodies still retain some sort of lightness to them. The little waltz around 2:37 onward in my favourite.
I’m not sure if I pick the folk and vivaldi references, but I’m sure was an inspiring point. It’s autumn here and it works just as well, thematically. But that’s just the weather for you.
about the violin solo sound:
I used ManyAmp, the amplifier VST effect which comes with ManyGuitar (I’ve recently bought it, but haven’t got the chance to use it in a song yet).
I wanted to try something lighter in terms of CPU usage in respect of IK AmpliTube, but your feedback proved it was not a so good idea
by the way, it should not have phase changes: it should just be a little distorted. Maybe this effect you hear is due to the fact that the violin has been often doubled by a violin which plays an octave below (that’s why you called it violin/cello), and the low Kbps rate could have caused this.
about folk/vivaldi influences:
Vivaldi had a subtle impact on this song, not really evident. About the folk in particular, I wonder if the fact that you don’t hear folk influence could be due to the fact that you are australian? would be interesting to hear an opinion by an european.
now that I finally have an hardware setup which allows me to render huge songs easily at 32 bits, I’ve updated this song with a slightly sweeter violin sound in the ending, some minor changes here and there, and a new jazzy part between 7’40" and 8’00".
I usually don’t refactor songs, but this time I really felt the need to, and maybe this is due to the fact that now I finally am able to edit things much faster.
I’ve updated the song a bit. The previous update, because of a Renoise bug in the original version, got bass volume reduced, so I’ve fixed this and also enhanced the general sound and made a little change in a couple of patterns.
I had to do this since ages, but have been always too lazy…
If you liked this song, which is in my opinion one of my best ones, you should enjoy it even more now. If you didn’t like it, there is nothing really new to find. If you have never listened this song before, and like to listen to a strange misture of progressive rock, classical music and folk, give it a try!
