Music

Freer
nathan, Minimoog, and Hammond 11100 and that is all.

For Real
A tune written by Nathan Snyder and recorded by the same with help from Stephen Baldassarre on drums and engineering. The tune was produced for the feature mockumentory "Half Ass Jig" However, the tune never made it to the mix of the film so three years later here it is.

nathan and stephen tune 1
live studio improvisational electric piano and drums - layered bass, guitar, and voice - 3min28sec

nathan and stephen tune 2
live studio improvisational electric piano and drums - layered bass, and guitar - 4min33sec

nathan and stephen tune 3
live studio improvisational guitar and drums - layered bass, and voice - 2min24sec

The above recordings are just live improvised music recorded privately in a studio. Subsequent tracks were added to fill out the impulsive performance.

Improvised music is relatively difficult for a solo musician. It is even more difficult when you add other musicians to the performance. A vocabulary of musical phrasing, fills and motifs must be developed and understood between the improvising musicians for the creation of coherent music. By combining one melodic instrument and one percussive set many of the conflicts of musical direction can be avoided. This leaves room for a drummer and a guitar player (melodic instrument) to mutually explore dynamics, timing (syncopation) rhythmic phrasing. The drummer generally sets the pace, time, and overall volume. The melodic instrument determines the key and much of the phrasing. However, much of the phrasing can be determined my the drummer. Mood, motif changes, dynamic crescendos, and a host of other subtle characteristics of a performance are jointly created my the drummer and melodic musician. The more closely the musicians listen to each other the more influence they will have over each and will share in the improvised musical creation.

mars dust (moog_synthesizer sample demonstration)
Nathan plays the famous Mini Moog. This sample is all Mini Moog, except for the electric guitar part. But the guitar was patched directly into the Mini Moog using it's modulation/filter bank. The Mini Moog used for this recording was borrowed from Andrew Cortens of "The Frim Frame Fellas."

When I Fall nathan plays banjo and piano.

First Day is a studio tune nathan recorded while on a lunch break in August 2006. The drum loops were added later. It was recorded using Sonic Foundry's Vegas 4.0, an M-Audio Delta 10/10 ADDA converter, A Beringer Tube preamp, an Audio Technica dynamic cardioid microphone for both the Washburn acoustic guitar and the Ibanez bass, with active pickups, played through a Pevey combo keyboard amp. The synthesized strings are from a Crumar Performer an old Italian combo organ. It was played through a Moviola squawk box (all tube with 5 inch speaker) and was miked with the Audio Technica also. The synthesized strings were doubled by copying the original file to another track. The original string track was paned hard left and the copy was paned hard right. The copy was detuned by about 2% using a vegas plug-in. The rhythm guitar has the low frequencies below 80Hz rolled off and a boost to the high frequencies above 5KHz. The solo guitar has low frequencies below 300Hz sharply rolled off, boost around 1KHz, and everything above 3KHz sharply rolled off, and is also heavily compressed. The click track can be heard on the rhythm guitar track because headphones were not used. The rhythm guitar track was used as the guide track for the bass and the synth strings. Very little bleed is apparent except for the click track. The original Alesis Monitor-Ones were used for monitoring and amplified with a Halfer dual channel studio amp.

Questions or comments about any of this music is appreciated. Contact nathan