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about

I'll be honest - the title of this track is just random gibberish. The working title was "PSOTY rip off" when this song first took form back in 2009. It was around then that I had just discovered that instrumental bands actually existed by somehow stumbling across the Lost Children net label on the Internet Archive. That's where I discovered the now world-dominating sleepmakeswaves as well as English band PSOTY. When I decided to work on the EP and use this song I gave it a massive overhaul and I think I have since transformed it into something that represents my own style.

I was also super impressed with the absolutely MASSIVE bass sound that Daniel [Natoli, producer/engineer] pulled out for this.

Detailed composition info, for the musos:
"Ham" is in a hybrid drop B tuning/standard (B F# D G B E - the 2 low strings are dropped while the rest are in standard), which I later discovered was similar to what Karnivool used to use a lot. I think I came up with it because I wanted to get some low, chunky power chords, but I didn't want to have to bother re-tuning every string, so dropping 2 strings was easy.

I played with the structure of "Ham" a lot. When I first wrote it, it basically jumped from the first distorted section straight to the big clean breakdown (at around 4:00), and there was no gratuitously long 'epilogue' at the end. While I was re-working it for the EP I wanted to include a few themes that recur in different transformations throughout the song to give it some cohesion, without just being a copy-and-paste exercise. The first thing I did was to bring the clean section towards the end of the track (around 7:10) in at another point (at 1:45). Then I had to work out how to make it flow in and out of this section, so I added the heavy bridge.

Then came the section (let's call this section "Billy") at 2:45. Billy uses a cycle of 3 bars of 6/8 followed by 1 bar of 2/4. I decided to flip this 3+1 pattern a little to change the intro a little, which felt a bit stale being a steady 4/4 the whole way, so I turned the intro into 2 bars 4/4, 1 bar 6/8, then another bar of 4/4. For the 'epilogue' I also took the chords from Billy, put them in reverse order and inverted the time signature changes so that this time it was mostly 4/4 with one bar of 6/8. This created a conceptual link back to both the intro and the 'Billy' section, to bring all the pieces of the track together - related, but different. However, when it came time to produce the album I decided to take out the chords so it was just the lead all on its lonesome - this means the transformation process above becomes kind of hidden. That's a technique I'd like to use again at some point.

credits

from Daybreak on Solstice, released June 22, 2015

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about

The Human Instrumentality Project Sydney, Australia

I am Pete from Sydney, Australia.

I like to make sounds.

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