John Murhpy - In the house, in a heartbeat.

Anyways.. while watching the movie Kick-Ass recently (awesome movie, by the way, I suggest you see it) I noticed that they had used the song (to my surprise) in the intense battle scene where big daddy whoops some mob ass. Hearing the song again reminded me of how much I loved (the original) and I thought it'd be fun to try my hand a doing a remake of it. It's great because the style of the song falls in so closely with my own style of writing music (soft, quiet starts, powerful, explosive finishes) that laying down the tracks for the song just feels really natural and fun. I'm going to draw the song out a little longer than the original I think, and I hope to make it a bit more ambient and intense and hopefully make it evolve a bit more organically.

Anyways! That's what i'm up to. Will have the song up as time permits.

So.. Many.. Tracks..

After nearly a month of fiddling with the same damn song I think i'm finally done with this piece. The track, which was originally to be a re-make of "Sixth Circle" has evolved into something else entirely. While maintaining some similarities to the original, this piece is considerably more elaborate, featuring the original acoustic guitar arpeggio piece, but then backed by more varied acoustic guitar work, full symphonic orchestration, heavier and more elaborate drumming, much heavier electric guitar work as well as a fairly elaborate solo piece near the end. The entire piece has become more progressive, more powerful and has a considerably more "epic" feel to it (for lack of a better word).

And, quite honestly, this is by the far most complicated song i've ever composed (see pic). Not so much in the sense of the music (though I have tried to break away from some bad compositional habits I have), but no, i'm referring to the sheer technical complexity of this piece. The massive amount of tracks and different instruments that i've got going on at once made this song a real challenge for me to mix and properly balance without things getting lost and/or muddy. However, it has been an enormous learning experience for me and the effort, I think, has been worth it. I am (mostly) pleased with the results and hopefully others will be too!

So, for now, i'm going to rest my ears, and tomorrow I will be doing the final master runs on the track, encode the files, and have them ready for download. Hopefully i'll have the piece on my fancy new Youtube channel as well, with some pretty visuals to go with it.

Appropriately, this new song will be entitled Coming Full Circle.

Check it out here

It basically illustrates just how bad modern music has gotten with heavy handed compression and limiting. It's terrible what labels will do just to chase a few extra bucks.