New Age Tune

When I sit down to tickle the ivories, so to speak, of my Yamaha MOX synthesizer I usually call up a piano voice in order to exercise my clumsy fingers and get into the proper mood. The other day, I played a few chords using the Ballad Key piano layer voice and found a chord sequence that had a sweet kind of New Age ring to it. I recorded it and added a step-recorded arpeggio using the Airy Nylon voice. It sounded really pretty. I was onto something. I recorded a simple drum pattern on top of all, and found a gentle lead synth voice (Soft RnB) to play a melody alongside it. It's a bit dull but fits the mood perfectly. Later, I added a Kitaro-ish bridge melody using a Bouzuki voice to lead to the finale of the tune. After I had assembled the instrumentation and recorded all the noises, I built the actual song using the MOX's pattern chain function. In essence, I run section A endlessly and then simply mute and unmute the various voice tracks whenever I think it's appropriate. Easy.

While listening to the finished piece for the first time, images appeared in my imagination, and I hadn't even had a single drink. The pictures that matched those in my head most closely were some that I had seen on the photo-blog by Hanspeter "Happy-Hapsi" Schär. He's a hobby/freelance photographer with professional equipment and stellar talent. He took a series of images of the young Emme river in the Emmen valley, the latter better known by its German name of cheesy fame Emmental. They were perfect to carry the mood of the song, so I had to have them for the music video. After I'd asked for – and obtained – permission to use a few of them in a video, I ...  well ... used a few of them in a video. What did you expect? The result can be watched below.

It is a bit faster than the usual New Age tunes that people listen to in order to reach higher levels of spirituality, and the drum pattern doesn't help either. But it's a rather quiet piece nonetheless. And the stunning pictures in the video should provide ample justification for anyone to suffer through the song.