Erissa's Journal: A Study of the Songbook of Ages

[Sagequeen]

Erissa's Journal as she unlocks the secrets of the Songbook of Ages. Please PM with comments if desired to keep the thread clean.

I have found the songbook exceptionally difficult to decipher. It is not the notes on the page that stump me, but instead the complexity. I still find it difficult to focus my power and split my voice to give life to the adjacent verses. Amazing! How a song can be so short yet enthrall the listener so he thinks an eternity has passed, I hope to one day learn. I can hear it repeatedly and discover something new each time. Here is my meager attempt at the first listing, a mournful tale of love found and lost in our ancient tongue.

I. Oh'mya (http://www.looperman.com/player.php?tid=115178)

[Hannibal]

The guitar and vocals sound like they're two entirely separate songs. There is no rhythmic interaction between your vocal harmonies and the guitar, and it sounds like your vocals are forming entirely different chords than the guitar is half of the time (as well as there are several parts where the vocals themselves are out of tune with one another). It is almost like fourth species Renaissance counterpoint, but if it is, it honestly isn't an interesting application of it, as there are too many voices interacting with each other in too many ways and the harmonies are too plain and too slow. There also isn't any A section or B section or anything, it's just a straight movement of start to finish with no single melody and no strong ending - which doesn't work. If you want to go start to finish that way, you either need one melody that is expounded upon until there's nothing left to expound upon or you have a harmonic progression that ends the song definitely, and all of the voices need to catch up to one another and end as one no matter how you choose to go about it.

Suggestions: Reduce the number of voices to two at any given time and rewrite the guitar part so that it works in conjunction with the vocals instead of as an entirely separate part. Rewrite the voices as 4th species counterpoint with whatever harmonic rules you want, but make sure to have a definite cadence of some sort.

On upside, your voice is pleasant and your guitar playing isn't bad.

[Sagequeen]

@Hannibal: I am pretty limited at the moment with my recording. The software here at work doesn't support a playback/record function. If it did, I'd have loved to do a straight harmony, but instead, I was doing separate takes without any real reference. But it's so darn fun, and eventually I'll hammer out something more listenable. With that said, this is an IC journal where everyone is invited to follow her (and me) in my process of developing a style of Elven song-magic. It'll get better... I hope. ^^ And thank you for the suggestions! Noted for future reference.