“The Chronicler”: A Final Musical Offering
Over the years as an iGlobe staff writer, I have presented several musical offerings to the readers. Now that I am soon embarking on the next four years of my life as a college student, I thought that the most appropriate way to say farewell to this online paper would be to present one last song. Thus, I present to you “The Chronicler,” one final song to soundtrack my departure from iCademy and the iGlobe.
Perhaps one or two of you remember last year, when I showed off a song called “Concept” and created a whole album/YouTube playlist to go with it. It was a fun yet laborious process of writing the songs, recording them using little more than an iPhone and the Digital Audio Workstation called Audacity, and then making lyric videos for each one. Well, this year I decided to do the same, and “The Chronicler” is serving as my leadoff track, as well as the de facto “single” to this album.
Now that you know what it is, why don’t I share how exactly I went about it this time? Oh, you wanted to know? Good. Otherwise this would be awkward.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to with this album, but I had a feeling it needed to be heavier. So I tuned my guitar down quite a bit, to what’s called Drop-C tuning . If you ask any metalhead guitarist about Drop-C, they’ll usually reply with something like “Yeah, man, Drop-C is the best! System of a Down uses that, right? Awesome, but I’ve, uh, never played in it though.” I resolved to therefore write most of my album in legendary tuning that most guitarists don’t actually use.
I set to work, using my fancy new golden distortion pedal to create new sounds that would make each song stand out. I wrote about a variety of subjects, including Call of Duty, a hypothetical future filled with drones, and the damage mankind is doing to the environment. All of these songs were nice, but interestingly, you won’t hear any of them in the upcoming album. One of those songs, however, made it to the album; “The Chronicler.”
For this song, I wanted to use a new scale, called the Hungarian Minor. I liked the creepy sound it gave, and knew that it may not know this yet, but it was born for metal. So I set to work making an instrumental that was heavy, melodic, and Hungarian. As a side note, you’ll hear two solos in this song, both of which I’m quite happy with. There’s nothing quite like having a skill and then showing it off twice in the span of 4 minutes, after all. Both solos were recorded with the “Randy Rhoades technique,” in which I actually played the same solo three times, and placed them on top of each other, to give it the same sound as famous Rhoades solos like that in “Crazy Train.” While I make no claim of being as good as Rhoades, it certainly does feel nice to sound like him.
With that done, I needed an appropriate lyric topic, and thus, began to search Wikipedia for something interesting that happened in Hungary. Eventually, I found the perfect metal story. There was once a man named Anonymous the Chronicler, who wrote a book on Hungarian history before disappearing from history himself. No one knew his name or what happened to him, but his book lived on, and is now a famously inaccurate story about Hungary.
That seemed like a good topic to me, and so I wrote up lyrics, some of which I later discarded in favor of new ones. But once I had figured out what I was going to say, I had what I felt was a pretty good song on my hands. Thus, I have made it the first track, and the one that I have the privilege of showing to you all.
From there, if you so desire, I will be posting new songs as part of the album, starting on June 5th. This album, which I’ve entitled “Constellations” after a line in one of the songs, will be heavier than when you last listened to me at “Concept,” but will be filled with more pretty musical moments. Track three in particular, a love song for my guitar called “Colors,” is well-received by people who don’t like some of the more beefy songs I do. The same goes for the second-to-last track, an acoustic song about open-mic nights called “Trick of the Light.” Thus, as I post these songs, I do hope that you listen to them, and more importantly, I hope you enjoy them.
And with that, I sign off for the last time as an iGlobe reporter. But one never knows, this might not be the last you hear of me. I can assure you, I won’t stop making music, or writing articles, and I won’t stop pushing to be better at whatever it is that I do next. So now, just click on the video above and enjoy “The Chronicler,” as my last musical gift to you. Thank you very much!