Okay, so I have a feeling this one will take me a while to explain.  For starters, this track is actually slightly older than the first two tracks I posted. The track was completed mid-June, but I probably started it in April or May.   Technically, the track might not have belonged on the Virtual CD at all, but I feel like it fits very well as track three.

Click here to download track three.

The origin of this music is that I've been spending a lot of time doing live looping music with a DigiTech JamMan pedal.  The pedal lets you record loops and overdub in real time for live performance.  I have used it a couple times performing with Ascent, which lets me loop a live percussion track, and then have the percussion continue to play while I play guitar over it.  I have both my guitar and a mike plugged into it, and the mike is generally pointed at a floor tom.  At home, I've been doing these long jam sessions with myself, where I layer up percussion of all kinds, then do all kinds of droning things with Ebow, as well as bass using the synth sounds in the Roland GT-5 pedal. Then I play solos over it, and/or try to create atmospheres with fading in chords and such.  It's great, meditative fun, and hours pass by in seconds.  I think it also lowers my blood pressure!

 Anyway, the JamMan pedal will let you store the loops you've created, and upload them as wave files to your computer.  As I had about fifty of these loops stored, I though that I should try to build a composition by stringing them together.  I actually did do this, and I'll call the results "Early Bird."  Maybe I'll upload that later.  I wasn't too satisfied with the way it turned out.  The loops from the JamMan are in mono, and were pretty dense with layers of sound.  I couldn't add that much to them to get any depth, and the composition didn't really achieve what I wanted.

So I decided that I would record a similar thing to what I'd been doing with the loops, but without using any loops at all.  That's what this track (Marsupials and Mammals) turned out to be.  I layered many tracks of percussion, including toms, slit drum, cymbals, a Sparkletts water bottle played with a mallet, and a Pepperidge Farms cookie tin (that's the sort of high pitched crash sound throughout).  I also added xylophone - It's an African xylophone that I bought at the state fair one year.  Each percussion part was recorded in mono using a condenser mike.  None of the parts are looped.

 Then I added several tracks of droning with the Ebow, the bass line, and the guitar chords, both clean and distorted. This was nice, but a bit boring just repeating endlessly for four minutes, so I created a chorus section, using Synful Orchestra.  Synful is worthy of a whole other post.  I LOVE this software.  It does a very nice job of emulating real strings.  I don't play these parts on the keyboard, but write them in staff notation in Sonar.  For this track, I didn't do anything too sophisticated.  It starts with violin and cello, then each time the chorus returns, I add another instrument.  The last couple of choruses have a horn.

 I played guitar solos with a few different sounds, just like I do when I play those live "jams."  The next to the last one was played on one string using the Ebow with a distorted sound. 

 Even with all these layers of sound, I apparently felt the need to add some more texture using samples.  There's a synth wind sound that happens a few times.  This was actually a free sample from one of those "computer music" magazines!  Even despite the obvious Pink Floyd connotations, I liked the texture that this added.

 I don't really know why I added the voices.  Maybe I had already crossed that Pink Floyd threshold, so I figured why not!  It's funny how much this particular trick has been used over the years, yet it never gets old.  I think that's because we are all saturated with meaningless voices out of context on TV and radio every day.  I was actually thinking of the announcer voices that feature on some of the earlier Porcupine Tree albums.  I searched the Internet looking for crazy preacher voices, but found this little documentary on the evolution from dinosaurs to birds. That's where all of the voice samples came from.

That's all there is to say about this one.  Please tell me what you think.  Please also read the little legal disclaimer I put on the Track One entry, if you haven’t already.  Thanks.