Scratching The Surface
I wrote this pretty much in two days. I thought I had a very short term notice to come up with an original song, so my goal was to do something cool that my quickly-assembled band would be able to learn and play as little stress as possible. Normally, I like my stuff a bit longer than this, but with the above stipulation, I think this came out pretty cool. The lyrics are by my friend and spur-of-the-month bandmate Gian, although you're obviously not going to be hearing them here ;) The arrangement heard here is for two 6-string guitars and a 5-string bass, all in standard tuning. I figured that with a second guitarist, it'd be cool if I threw in a few nice harmony lines (well, yeah, all the Megadeth and Shadows Fall I was listening to probably inspired that). I kept the bassline fairly simple; a lot of root stuff for the main riffs, but I let it fill out a bit more with some diads and arpeggios in the other sections of the song. During the chorus, there's a low B5 that sounds like it could be a 7-string, but it's really just an inverted-5th B5/F# diad with the bass playing the open 5th string for good measure. The syncopated riff before and after the solo was the killer; after I wrote it, I had a hard time remembering it :P The solo's pretty simple. Again, with the short time I thought we had to come up with this, I wanted something I'd be able to nail without weeks of effort, but still cool. I originally didn't have that last part as a bend when I wrote it; I used separate notes throughout that. When I started actually playing the part some more, I kind of naturally went for a bend instead, so that's where I went with it. It sounds cooler that way. Finally, that ending is basically the various harmony parts strung together for a short finale. Hope you dig it!

Third Simulacrum
This one goes back to last year; still my little masterpiece. I came up with the opening melody quite some time before. After something I heard in school that day, I was in one of those kind of down, kind of uncertain moods. I continued that melody and ended up branching it into its own epic. The MIDI here features two 6-string guitars (with clean and distortion settings for each, so that's 4 patches right there), a 4-string bass, and vocals (with a viola for the MIDI patch). That's the vocal melody, not actual lyrics, but the melody is integral in that I wrote it along with the song. It's got 5 (yep, 5) guitar solos, but hopefully it comes off as tastefully done. Dig away!