Bittersweet
I’m excited to share with you my new original song for solo acoustic guitar, “Bittersweet.” It’s about the sometimes piercing love that you feel about children and family. This is a departure from my ambient electronic music, more personal and emotional, just me and my classical guitar. I hope you enjoy listening.
My songwriting teacher, guitarist and composer Mark Grundhoefer of Atlanta, Georgia, helped me develop “Bittersweet” out of the opening riff, and he provided a lot of guidance with the recording, mixing, and mastering as well. My guitar on the track is a Yamaha NCX1FM, a sturdy and reliable classical cutaway guitar with reasonably good intonation. I have found that expensive guitars make me afraid to handle them, while medium guitars make me comfortable enough to play what I feel and what I want to hear and create in the world without having to worry about breaking a fussy teacup of an instrument when I bash it into a doorway or something. My mics are by AKG, my DAW is Reaper, my EQ is Tokyo Dawn, my monitors are Samson, and my reverb is Valhalla’s VintageVerb.
Sheet music in notation and TAB will be available soon from ArrangeMe, a Hal Leonard company.
Twilight Chorus
“Twilight Chorus” is a new ambient composition especially engineered to help you fall asleep. At 15 minutes in length and featuring the soothing sounds of nature and crickets at twilight blended with warm vintage synthesizer tones, “Twilight Chorus” gives you the time and space to let go and drift off to sleep.
Composition notes
Field-recordings taken at evening in suburban Springfield, PA in late August, 2022 with a Tascam DR-05 portable audio recorder. Mixed and mastered in Reaper with noteworthy plugins provided by Digital Suburban, Spitfire Labs, Tokyo Dawn Labs, and Valhalla’s lovely Supermassive Reverb.
Waterfall Meditations
“Waterfall Meditations” is an ambient composition by Chris Mohnacky (DBA sandwichTiger) that blends guitar, synth and field-recordings to create a pensive, long-playing soundscape perfect for doing yoga, meditating or falling asleep.
Released in January 2022, streaming worldwide on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, and elsewhere.
Composition notes
The field-recordings come from Oakview Falls in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a desolate place in January, but lovely to listen to in the cold air. The synthesizer is Dexed, “a multi platform, multi format plugin synth that is closely modeled on the Yamaha DX7,” providing clear, glassy tones that harmonize with the wind and water. The guitar is my Gretsch hollow-body guitar with Dr. Thomastik flatwound jazz strings digitally detuned to provide the bass. Mixed and mastered in Reaper with noteworthy reverb from Valhalla and EQ from Tokyo Dawn Labs. Registered with BMI and distributed by Gyrostream.
Special thanks to my family, who never fail to support me in my ridiculous projects. Thanks also to my songwriting teacher Mark Grundhoefer.
How's it going? 