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Danish guitarist Steen Grøntved is a veteran
of the session music scene having appeared on countless
releases over the last few years (within Denmark
mostly) across many genres. Steen makes his
debut onto the instrumental guitar platform with the
fusion/jazz/rock rich ‘Night Vision Goggles’.
The album is home to 12 tracks that travel through
a myriad of tonalities and cultural expressions with
an end product that is very accessible and possesses
strong melodic content.
On
the music Steen has offered some of his observations.
01 Timber:
this song was actually one of the last ones I composed. I
was listening a bit to a Greg Howe tune called Jump start
on the record ”introspection”, and you can maybe call it a
weird paraphrase on that tune (before it got loose!). I
call it timber because the stabs in the intro reminded me
of a tree falling.
02 The Worm:
the composition of this tune is rather not-ostinate-like.
One of the reasons is that it is composed and arranged
completely without an instrument. It is actually ”written”(with
small bars) directly into the key-editor of Cubase. It was
one of the first songs I composed and at that time I
didn’t have a midi-keyboard.
03 Playground:
this track was a little yellow-jackets inspired. It is a
very simple melodic, very soft and easy going. A fast
composition, it almost made it self.
04 Home planet:
a melodic little space-pop tune.
05 Run:
when I composed this tune it was actually meant to be a
Satriani-like tune. I asked a Danish R&B producer (named
Ezi cut) to mix it and the result is something-Joe-Satri-R&B-ani-like!
I don’t think I ever have heard that before! (is that good
or bad?). The solo has at the beginning a conventional
picking sequence, next a long sweep-picking sequence and
after the B-part a long tapping sequence. The sound you
hear at the very end, is the drumsticks that are being
laid down on the snare drum.
06 Bye:
ohh haven’t we all tried that?, Can’t fall a sleep because
of a heartache. A different version of an
internationally famous song, in Danish called ”Mester
Jacob”, nobody knows who composed it, so I guess there’s
no copyright on that one!! (he-he).
07 Secret lab
is like the brother for track 02 The Worm (Same-story).
08 My Butterfly:
a nice and calm 8-finger tapping tune..
09 Still Here
Josef is singing the intro while he is slapping his
leather pans in a very naughty way!
10 Round and around:
The bass is making a melody and baseline at the same time,
which is typical of some west-African kinds of music. The
voice in the beginning saying ”one two” is a Macintosh speaking (I think it is Fred?). The flour-tam has been
replaced with a big-drum standing on its diagonal; Which
explains the grotesque flour-tam sound. Nikolaj is making
a nice bass-solo.
11 What Mango?:
if you love dancing to a sexy Mambo-tune you’re probably
gonna hate this track. You will soon find out that it is
the Mambo from hell. It goes originally in 7, but no one
has apparently told the guitarist! It is a song that plays
a lot around with poly-rhythms. Lars Ringgaard is playing
a nice blues-harp-solo, on this track.
12 Find the pick:
This is a “slap-tune” on a Spanish guitar. It is actually
recorded with 6-microfones, but we didn’t really pay much
attention to that in the mix. During the slap, I’m holding
a pick in my right hand all the time (just a habit) and
when it suddenly slips out of my hand, you can hear almost
exactly where it lands because of the overkill number of
microphones.
General
Question: why does the synth-themes/solos on NVG
have such weird melodies?
Answer: All of the background keyboards is
programmed in Cubase, but all of the synthesizer
solo’s/themes is played live on the guitar-synthesizer and
recorded directly onto the 16-track Tascam why they can
sometimes sound a little bit out of tune.
Besides that I have also tuned the guitar-synthesizer
in a totally different way. It is tuned with a
fifth between each string like a Cello. So the
tuning(from the low string) will be: E, H, F#, C#, G#,
D#. That gives me almost an extra
octave on the guitar (a sharp 7 to be precise), but of
course the scales are different(stretchy –
stretchy!). The hard work of learning totally different
scales for the guitar- synthesizer, pays of in fore an
example in the pentatonic benefits; it is easier to make
fast pentatonic sequences or even pentatonic
sweep-picking.
On the music Steen comments,
“I have worked a lot as a studio musician, which means
that in most cases I haven’t really been in charge. My
goal with making this record was to try to free my mind
and just compose the things that came to my mind without
worrying about if it was saleable or listenable. In most
other relationships I have composed together with other
people and there is a lot of advantages by doing that but
there are some too by sometime composing alone and I
really like both. This is one of the few projects I have
been involved in, where I decided to compose and arrange
the entire thing alone. It was very hard to find a
bass-player that dared to test his skills with some of the
weird poly-rhythms. After 3-4 phone-calls with
“uhhh....no..well... thats.... not really my style...’s” I
finally called Nikolaj Storr who said ”no problem - I’m
used to that kind of music!”.
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