Sleepless (Viola da Gamba, Guitar, Harpsichord & EBow)

Sleepless (Viola da Gamba, Guitar, Harpsichord & EBow)

First of all, I want to give a big, big thank you to @raffaelseyfried. It got this little harpsichord through him, and I am immensely grateful! He is an amazing musician, we worked together in the past on film scores and hopefully will again in the near future. I put links to his music below, so you can check out his stuff. The very first thing I wanted to try when I got the harpsichord, was to see if the EBow works, which it does beautifully, especially in the middle and high registers. The lower you go, the probality increases, that you will excite one of the harmonics rather than the fundamental, as you can observe in the video, if you watch carefully. The lowest strings eventually get too heavy, and don't react at all. As you can see, I have to dampen the adjacent strings with my left hand, otherwise placing and lifting the EBow would make them resonate with unwanted chromatic neighboring notes. I like the sound it produces a lot, especially with the delay I have it running through. It reminds me very much of an Ondes Martenot, which makes sense, since both are amalgamations of acoustic and electronic sound creation processes. The track itself was originally supposed to sound completely different. There was another layer of guitar, phasing with the first guitar, two layers of percussion, and a much more densely played Viola da Gamba Improvisation. In the end, I threw all of that out, kept only the simpler phrases, so the sounds can breathe more, and now I like it much more this way.

You can find Raffaels music here:

Website:
http://raffaelseyfried.com
Bandcamp:
https://raffaelseyfried.bandcamp.com/
Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/raffaelseyfried