Catching Sunlight

As days get longer, flowers shoot up in the garden, it is hard to be grumpy. Here is a bright optimistic song.
It is a fast paced jazzy piece. I am very satisfied with both the main melody and the piano improvisation which took me a long time to get to even though it turned out quite simple at the end.

Some background of the making. I started like I normally do with making a nice chord progression thinking that the end should be a jazzy song with lots of 7th chords.

For the melody development I let some arpeggiated synth play it on my iPad while I walked around and hummed and occationally captured some notes on my iPad. And then when I had the overall melody I started the project in Logic Pro by first keying in the chords.

I used the Session Piano Player to do the initial arpeggio playing. You can actually influence how it plays a lot. There are almost endless ways you can set it up and use different settings in small sections. I reduced the track to only left hand, and to get the correct voice leading I wanted I converted it to MIDI and did quite many corrections. But the result is one I am still not skillfull enough to play live.

The melody in the right hand is played live by me.

I then added the synth which is NI Glace2 with some "Ahh" patches mixed. And then I did the trumpet. Both played by hand so the piece has variations. And what I spent most time on is the piano improvisation between the synth and the trump section.
Drums are hammered in manually on the keyboard using NI Abbey Road 70s kit.
Bass is played manually on the keyboard using Modobass Modern J-Bass with some amp tweaks.
There are some small chords on a Jazz Vintage B3
And some programmed arpeggios playing with NI String Ensemble with Pizzicato articulations only. Give a nice air without being block chord like.
I had a lot of other synth sounds but I removed them one by one as the song stands best with a simple expression with small orchestra.

Image is generated by Google Gemini. "Make an image of Catching Sunlight". And followed. by "Can you replace the guy with a cute woman?"

Genre: Jazz
Artists: Kenneth Lavrsen
Composer: Kenneth Lavrsen
Lyrics:
Published: 23 Feb 2025
Copyright: 2025