|
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!”.
| 
