Many strings

I have started work on 3.1.3: The Holy Spirit.  After the challenging and often discordant things running up to this I have decided that harmonic and melodic is the order of the day, also light and maybe a little airy.  So I have a nice bouncy little chord sequence (Am7, C, G, Fmaj7) which gets repeated several times.

Before this comes in I have chimes (those metal things handing from a long stick which a drummer occasionally runs his stick along) which I used to joke with my friend Bob (a drummer at church) signified the working of the holy spirit. In the same vein a harp is introduced.  

Back at the chord sequence, in a fairly traditional sense instruments are introduced one at a time, first bass drum and synth (the same absynth sound I have used in the previous two sub-sections) then acoustic guitars (6-string on one side, 12-string on the other), then shakers and ukuleles (well the same ukulele played twice, of course, once for each ear), then bass.

At this point I'd like to say I have just recently bought the uke, it called to me in a music shop and I succumbed, after all it was only £15 - making total expenditure on this album, ermmm £15 more than it was last time.  The most striking thing about it is that it is pink. I can live with that.  I play it with a non-standard tuning - I had a peek in a book in the music shop and it should be tuned G-C-A-E, but I have always thought it was G-D-A-E, which makes it the same as a mandolin or violin.  having already learned to play several chords with this tuning I thought I would stick with it.

So after the build-up there are 4 more times through the chords which is destined to have a solo over it, probably flute.  Then there is a "breakdown", a quieter version of the chords twice.  Following this is 8 times more, losing the shaker and introducing a fuller drum-kit (with programmed drums but played cymbals). This has an electric guitar solo over it (which I think I am happy with) and the bass will follow the solo playing the same notes, but lower. In this section, even if I don't count the uke twice there are a total of 30 strings on all the instruments being played.  I have done a lot of tuning tonight.

This then gives way back to the harp (but I'm not happy with the transition yet, I need to work on it).

One odd thing that happened is that I used the bass drum pulse to keep me in time while playing acoustic guitars and uke, and then replaced it with the programmed drums.  It turns out I was not playing well enough in time and had to tweak the placement of the programmed drums to slightly earlier to make it match up better.