Song of the Month 2010.02 - ezo09

Song of the Month 2010 #2



Song title: ezo09 ("ezonine")
Audio file: http://kurtasbestos.com/ongaks/Panda_Left-ezo09.mp3
Date Recorded: 2010.02.28
Equipment: KORG DS-10, KORG D888
Instruments: broken jaw harp

Concept: I started this song last summer during the 5-hour wait in line to get inside Rising Sun 2010. I continued working on it occasionally when I had time to kill (the train to Nayoro and the bus to Shizuoka), and on the plane back home at the end of the trip. Because February marks the halfway point between Rising Sun 2010 and 2011, I decided that would be the best time to release it.

Process: I actually finished this song pretty shortly after coming back to the States, but something wasn't quite right. The DS-10 only allows you 16 patterns per song, and I had already filled them all up, but I didn't have a good transition to lead into the ending. At the "quiet" part at 3:20, I also had a quieter pattern. Unfortunately, you can't set a separate tempo for each pattern, which is sort of what I wanted there (so the tempo would speed back up slowly during the transition into the end), so I ended up getting rid of that pattern entirely in order to make room for the transition at 4:30. I'm pretty happy with that decision. The jaw harp was pretty spontaneous... I thought about adding one about 2 days before I started practicing for the recording. Unfortunately, the only jaw harp I had in the right key is broken, which made it hard to play. Otherwise... some other things I tried in this song were messing with effects (as they fade in and out) and messing with the swing setting, which does... that. Swing. Actually, messing with that was the first thing I did with this song, so it ended up being pretty integral to the whole thing.

Comments: I had this recording done before the end of February, and even posted it up on my diary on Mixi, but I didn't want to post it here until I finished my traveblog. It was a lot easier to record than January's song, but still, I could have used more practice. There are a couple of fade-outs that end too quickly, and one cymbol that I didn't mute fast enough, but otherwise it turned out more or less like I wanted it to.