The Vision
It has taken almost 3 years to complete ‘Fire and Gold’ and what an incredible process it has been. Initially the plan was to embellish some of the pieces on the CD, but as the project progressed, the vision changed considerably. Knowing that the possibilities of music production were endless, I decided that adding more live instrumentation would further benefit and enhance the pieces. This change of vision delayed the project substantially (and also gave my producer a lot more technical challenges to deal with). Because we wanted to add live instrumentation, we hired Farshid Samandari, classically trained in Iran, to score the nay flute, santour, cello and flute. Other live instruments were recorded spontaneously. One of the elements that I am most excited about ‘Fire and Gold’ is the diversity of instrumentation. The nay flute, santour, Celtic harp, cello, flute, Spanish guitar and the Chinese erhu have truly enriched ‘Fire and Gold’.
Thought of the Day:
“The art of music is divine and effective. It is the food of the soul and spirit.”
Abdu’l-Baha
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There were challenges deciding to expand the production when the basic elements had been recorded without redoing everything that had been done again to a strict metronome. Elika is an incredible pianist and composer, and some of the songs had such elaborate piano parts that to try and re record these to a metronome would change the lovely organic flowing feel of the piece.
So we had to improvise, sometimes by creating a changing metronome for the performer, but we found that didn’t work well with a score, and in that case, the music has to be manually transcribed, which thankfully, Farshid was able to do.
Even so, there were timing differences that had to be compensated for, in some cases, I thought the performers were playing different parts than they were supposed to because they started a few bars late!
I don’t want to go on incessantly about it, but having to compensate for these issues a week before the CD was to be mixed made keeping our deadline challenging. Elika opted to remove some of the live instruments rather than make her dear audience wait any further! But she didn’t have to thankfully, because those songs would have never been the same without the live instruments and the embellishments Farshid was able to add to the parts Elika and I composed. I attribute the ultimate success of the project regardless of these challenges to divine assistance! There were a lot of prayers going on at the end of this CD.