New Orleans Blues

Sleu,

Now this is only my opinion but I thought it was really good, very Draculesque if you know what I mean...I wish I lived in a castle in Transylvania I'd have that piped throughout the house.

I won't ask you the details of how this was produced cuz it would probably hurt my brain but in any event it was very cool.

How did you come up with the name for the piece? Just wondering?

You think I could jam over that?

Thanks man. :) The production was actually fairly simple. I first wrote the notes down in Sibelius, then selected the full pipe organ from a 'sound database' and added a reverb effect to it. Then just hit 'record' and it's done. :D You can try improv'ing over it but the chord progression might be tough. Top of my head:

Fm-Caug-E7-Am7-Dm7-E-Am7-Am (2x)
F-F-F-F-Em-loads of F-Em-F-Em
Fm-Caug-E7-Am7-Dm7-E-Am7-Am (2x)

I got the idea of this piece when watching television some time ago. There was a documentary on New Orleans and how it was doing after the events. I automatically had assumed things were all back to normal again but apparatly that was not the case. Made me wonder how this could be, and why the European Union didn't step up if the US government seemed to have problems handling the situation. This should be a sad, but slightly angry, song. It doesn't have any politcal message at all other then that it seemed as though not everyone in the world cared as much as they could. Remember this was some time ago so it isn't a song about how things are now or should be now, that's not up to me anyways.

I think I saw that, the Spike Lee documentary? I don't remember the music that much but if it plays again which it will I'll listen closer.

New Orleans is a great place to visit I've been there many times. The last time just a month before the hurricane hit, and it's still like a war zone in many neighborhoods...pretty sad when we can spend billions in Iraq and after all this time still haven't rebuild this city or taken care of the people.

I think it needs visuals like a video to really make a statement, as it stands alone I love that deep organ sound. Have you ever tried putting images to any of your pieces, seems like it would be a natural progression.

Anyway pretty cool.

I have made one clip so far, for a fairly abstract song. Just vocals and one insanely overdriven electric guitar: http://www.soundclick.com/bands/videos.cfm?bandID=361288

I'm not too sure who Spike Lee is, the documentary was an hour or so and seemed to have been composed of fragments of a larger program. I agree that graphics would add tremendously but I'm a bit hesitant about being too 'pushy' here. I'm Dutch, 21-years old, never have been to New Orleans nor experienced anything like Katrina. It isn't really up to me to make big statements, it probably would cause offense one way or the other.

But it's a good suggestion, I'll think some more about it. I could turn it into a 'slide-show'-kinda thing, showing just random photos of the situation itself.

It doesn't necesarrily have to be of the Katrina diaster. I could see this with any images of war, poverty, despair, destruction etc. without making any real political statement or maybe a collage of those types of images from all over the world all under the umbrella of this dark, brooding music. To me it screams for something like that.

Spike Lee did a 4 hour documentary on the Katrina diaster for HBO (Home Box Office) here in the states. I'm sure there were probably others but that's one of the ones I saw.