Distance - Carrier Music

Distance is a track I’ve been writing for over two weeks. The track consists of a violin quintet, a grand piano, an acoustic slide guitar and a horn. The piece helped me to focus on the arrangement of the track, since the piece had a sketch with a consistent flowing melody, allowed me to put the voices to the different instruments in the track. the piece is in ternary form: intro, A, B, bridge, A, outro. it starts with the piano setting up the harmony of the piece in the key of F Lydian. the 1A section introduces the melody through the acoustic guitar and a solo violin. after the 1A section, the piece leads into the B section, introducing the string quartet. the quartet plays a rhythmic, harmonic figure on two violins, and a melody and an accompaniment melody on the other two, with the fifth supporting the final chord of the section. the B section plays in and out of C Lydian key. the bridge utilises a sequenced quarter note pattern moving in and out of the supporting harmony I-bVII-vi, finishing on an arpeggio. The 2A section returns to the main melody, transposed to the Bb Lydian scale, then ends on a descending I-vii-vi progression.
This piece has been quite informative to write, since the composition was sketched on the piano it helped with fleshing out the melody's and harmonies of the piece, along with the accompaniment parts. i now realise when to use a sketch piano and when not to. when it comes to long form melody's utilising complex harmonies or figures, sketching out before hand can be beneficial. On top of that a part of which i would record myself, would also help with writing. with the mixing, i attempted to create depth by using reverb to put things into the background, middle ground and foreground. For the most part, the piano and guitar keep the foreground and function more as the focal point. the strings (minus the melody in the 1A section) is more in the middle ground and the horn is in the background. i also recorded the acoustic guitar as a lap steel, this was achieved by using a high action guitar extender, which is placed towards the head of the fretboard. this created a nice lap steel sound that fits the track quite effectively. unfortunately, because I used a steel acoustic guitar, it produced some unwanted frequencies when moving the slide. in future, id either rerecord more takes to remove the unwanted sounds or edit them out in the mixing stage.
This piece uses Embertone’s Joshua Bell Violin, 8Dio’s 20th Century Solo Brass and Native Instruments Noir Piano
Composed and mixed in Cubase using iZotopes Ozone, Soundtoys 5 Collection and KiloHearts essentials
Guitar recorded using Shure’s SM81 and SM57
notated in dorico and edited in DaVinci Resolve