Charles Ives, a composer 100 years ahead of his time (still ahead, really), was deeply inspired by an experience in his youth, where he would sit around outside and listen to distant music; to the left, a brass band was playing, preparing for a competition; to the right, another brass band was playing, also preparing for said composition.

Both were obviously playing different music at different speeds, different pitches and dynamics. But the strange cacophony coming into each ear was somehow beautiful to Ives and shaped the way he constructed his music ever since.

I am typically inclined to agree with him in this pleasure endeavour. Not all music, to me, is definitively 'music' as we typically hear it. I will often happily turn my music off - and all electronics - to sit back and listen to the rain-traffic-bird symphony going on outside.

Which is why, when I listen to the totally unmixed recording above of my Viola playing a whole string section by itself, with its begginer's scratchy tone not unlike the sound of a dying rat, the intonation - tuning - of a wet pig, and the subtle dynamics of a scheduled New York demolition, I find some inexplicable comfort in its warmth.

Strange. However, I think if anybody has ever lived by a school and heard the sound of their shouts, their football kicks and the teacher's whistles, you'll understand the feeling I'm trying to get at. This school experience is total cacophony, but we enjoy it like a relaxing day at the beach.

So I regret that I had to 'improve' it by mixing it into the piece you can watch below. Now the first thing you'll notice is the melody is still scratchy as hell. I could probably have fixed it with some basic software manipulation but this whole thing was a quick job. Check it out:

Ok so it wasn't THAT quick. maybe 4-hours from composition-release.

The Process

I had written an 8-chord progression for my 12th grade students to expand on for their final project. I liked those chords so I decided to play with them myself.

So I listened to each part and played each line on the viola. However, there is some deep bass notes too, so I had to de-tune the viola (via software) by 2 octaves to mimic the double bass. You don't get the resonance needed, but more on that later.

This by itself doesn't sound good at all. Imagine two violins; a violin duet. Typically this is one of the harder things to sound good because there's no way you can mask your intonation imperfections, and in fact it may directly clash with your partner, making the out-of-tuneness all the more obvious and worse.

The sound waves are clashing like you might see in a hurricane unless you're totally perfect. The same goes here. With only 4 viola parts, all accompanying roughly the same pitch range, the detuning of an obvious beginner sounds somewhat terrible.

My solution? Record each part 3 times! Thus, what you are listening to is actually 12 tracks of viola, plus 2 doubles viola tracks for the extra low bass. The mixture of frequencies now, combined with all the vibrations, helps average out the tone and warm it up a bit. This is why orchestral strings sound extremely different to quartets, whereas doubling a track on a computer just makes it louder and not much else.

The problem now is that the viola is just one instrument. It only has one core tone. It all sounds the same. An advanced musician May be able to play it in ways that make it sound unique for each track, like an impressionist doing Trump and Obama in the same sentence. Not happening for me.

On top of that, the body of the viola doesn't exactly have the resonance of a cello or double bass, so the entire track was missing some 'oomph'.

This is why you might hear some vocals. I actually recorded another... 10 or so tracks of me singing further complementary harmonies (not all of which were used), so give some softer tones filling out the parts of the spectrum not covered by the viola. I had to detune the lowest two notes I couldn't reach, too. Sometimes I can when warmed up but this wasn't one of those days.

All of this had to get digitally tuned with Melodyne - though I didn't want it to become too dishonest so you can still hear tuning imperfections.

Add a ton of reverb to further mask the intense amount of awful noise, and voila.

I call this piece... 'meh'.

Which version do you prefer?