For The Moment

The Moment
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Like every song, it started with a moment.  The moment of first seeing a picture of another moment.  A photograph she remembered well but was a little sad she couldn't find any more to post on this blog.

It was in the arena, perhaps during autumn.  Perhaps towards the last hours of a festival.  Most of them she knew well, some not so well, but of course she would call them all her friends.  There were around ten people in the picture.  None of them were aware of the camera at all.  They were having too much fun.  Every face was smiling....even the ones you couldn't quite see.  You could still tell they were happy by the rest of the body language.  They were playing, dancing and laughing. 

That was one of the moments that festival crew exist to provide space for.  Perhaps only the photographer was conscious of the perfectness of the picture of that moment, at the time...and I'm sure they were smiling too.  

Nobody was anxious, nobody was self conscious, ashamed, sad or upset.  They were simply being themselves, doing their own  thing that only they could do, without a care in the world, for a brief snapshot in time, captured by another human soul with a piece of technology in their hand.

​The Song

The first two lines of the song came directly from the seeing of that photograph.  The rest flowed as naturally as a river does, in the only path gravity will allow it to flow on.  
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"Sing One for the People with me now,

Blaze up for our friends around the world,

Spill a drop for the ones who've gone before"
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~Feraliza, For the Moment

The cover art was made by twisting and distorting a beautiful picture of a sunset taken in another moment on the West Coast.  Memories and photographs are never as good as the real thing.

​The Production

This version of the song was created in August 2021 as part of an academic moment where Feraliza was given the chance to put to use all the new skills and knowledge she had gained in her studies so far in an audio software assignment, for which she chose the option of producing her own composition.  She decided to give herself the extra challenge of producing all the sounds on the track from scratch as she was having fun playing with software synthesizers to make all different types of noises.

Feraliza doesn't do click tracks.  There is something very un musical about them to her.  Just a little bit too clinical perhaps.  So she started by creating a simple drum loop just to keep her within the reasonabubble confines of a grid like structure.  Something solid to build the rest of the track around.  None of those sounds are in the track you hear now, as after the guitar and the first vocal was put down, they were revisited and extrapolated upon to fit in more groovily with the different sections of the song.

The bass insisted on being a droning sinusoidal wave Feraliza played on her newly acquired midi keyboard while messing with the distortion filter cutoff using one of her favorite tweaky knobs.

Feraliza drove her housemates up the walls while figuring out the fiddle bits, but they remained remarkably kind to her as she made herself play each part twice the same. At that point she had not tried to play the same thing twice on the fiddle before and it proved quite a challenge.  No piece of music is ever played exactly the same twice though, which is just as well in the end, it sounds better that way.  Then she was able to pan each fiddle to either side of the listener to make us all feel surrounded by fiddles in parts and then bring them into the centre when it was their turn to sing.

There were some more vocal takes after that, a little magic and a flick of a silver chalice and it was worth an A+!
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