This is the beginning of my Journal to document my progress with the collaborative effort at Blockmountain (@blockmountain supported by @sndbox). It is an initiative to to bring together creative minds (this time, musicians from across many genres), to form an album of collaborative art that showcases some of the talent on Steemit.

The game plan

So, last week the BlockMountain co-ordinators posted this post about the game plan for the collaboration. After reading it a few times and asking some questions on Discord, I came to the slightly unsettling conclusion that it was a type of recording style that I was not familiar with at all! However, a touch of uncertainty is a nice and essential ingredient for a worthwhile piece of art!

Additive recording

This was the bit that was unfamiliar to me. Normally, when "Classical" musicians record, we do it as a complete ensemble in a concert space. So, it is a big endeavour to have the technicians and the venue and all the musicians in the same place at the same time. Money helps....

The idea that we would start with a "starter" track and then each subsequent musician would add new tracks on top of it was new to me. I had known that people do this, especially in the more contemporary forms of music, but I've never done it myself!

So, my first task in the first round was to come up with a starter track for others to build upon.

Finding a piece

As a melodic/treble line instrument, it is difficult to find a suitable thing that others might build upon. Normally, music is built from the bottom up, starting with the harmony and then adding the rest as layers. Well, at least, that is my experience of it, speaking from a Baroque style of composition and understanding!

So, I thought that something that would be not a complete set of music, yet had enough looping around with harmonic progression would be best to build upon. Something that developed too much harmonically would be difficult for the following person to do anything with!

Thankfully, Baroque music has many styles of ground bass dances, like Chaconnes and Passacaglia, that are based around a repeating harmonic progression that has embellished lines built on top of them. In the end, I settled upon this Ciacona by Biber from the Mystery Sonatas. It has a repeating harmonic progression, and many varied types of sections within it. The person after me would be able to chop and change and pick what they would need quite easily without being constrained too much by my first starter track.

Choosing a Weapon

The piece is from the Mystery Sonatas, and is originally written for a mistuned violin. So, the notation in the treble line is not the sounding pitch, but the scordatura (tablature) fingering. I was considering to just use my Baroque violin for the recording, it is a beautiful instrument from around 1770 that is a pleasure to play! However, given that I would be recording this from home, it would be not so good for recording in the living room. Also, I wanted an excuse to use my Viola d'amore which I had just written about.

This is a really nice 7 stringed (plus 7 resonant, for a total of 14 strings) instrument that was primarily used in the Baroque era before dying out. Although it is held like a violin, it is related to the gamba family of instruments and not part of the violin family. Thus, it has a different sound and quality of timbre, a much softer gentler sound compared to the brilliance of a violin.

Potential difficulties for the next person

At the moment (let's see after the recording!), the biggest potential issue is really quite a minor one. My instruments (well, the Baroque ones at least) are tuned to A=415Hz as this is "generic" pitch for Early Music Baroque instruments. Thus, the string gauges (thicknesses) are optimised for that. They are pure wound gut strings and so it is not so easy to take them on and off without a bit of settlling time which I don't have, and also finding a new set of optimum gauges across the instrument is a lengthy affair (years of trial and error!).

So, in the end I decided to keep the pitch at 415Hz. This means that the person that follows will need to read everything in the music a semitone lower (an A written, sounds like an A flat). Not too big a deal, I think... I hope!

My plan

Well, tomorrow, I have the day off and the kids are either at school or daycare. So, I have a few hours free at home by myself to try to learn the sonata and then record a few takes of it. Fingers crossed that it goes smoothly, I have played this sonata in the past, however, learning it on completely different instrument is a little bit trickier!