About a year ago, Deadmau5 released 7 piano instrumentals on his Soundcloud in an EP entitled "7". The EP was named for the seven tracks that each represented one of the seven deadly sins (luxuria, gula, avaritia, acedia, ira, invidia, and superbia). Of the seven, Ira has been not only my favorite instrumental from the EP, but one of my favorite Deadmau5 songs of all time as well. It has the most unbelievably dark, melancholy, albeit beautiful atmosphere of just about any composition I've ever heard. On more than a few occasions I've found myself deep in though, or drifting in and out of consciousness late at night while listening to this song, and about two weeks ago I though I'd try to put my own spin on that same awesome production, but with the Chapman Stick in place of the Grand Piano.
I started out trying to play the entire composition to a click track, but I couldn't get it sound uniform enough to my ear. What I ended up doing in the final track was recording individual segments at a slightly slower tempo than the end result, and stitching the tails together piece by piece so it locked into the grid perfectly. After I had the raw composition laid down, I processed the bass and melody sides individually, and added a light pad synth below the Stick to further unify the track (the original also has a background pad). After a quick mix and master I think my Stick version of Ira is just as good (if not better) than the original. Honestly I feel like the Stick suits this composition better than the piano because the Chapman Stick just sounds darker to my ear.
Enjoy and let me know what you think! This is my first real production with the Stick so I'd love the feedback!

I like it more than I have liked anything he has ever done, including his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience. Well done!

Very nice job, really clean.

Excellent! very enjoyable! works really well with the stick. After a while you don't even think it's played with one

This sounds great! Not only that it is cool music but the sound you're getting at with that meticulous production method is fantastic. You're basically turning the Stick into a "manual sampler" I like the firm bass tone you're getting there.

I do that too sometimes with my harp guitar; first I did it because I needed to retune harpstrings to lay down some parts with many notes but I made the same discovery as you, that it is a great way, although time consuming, to reach a consistent sound in general.

Another related production technique I just started with this week is to not always let tails ring out but copy a bit of a tail to the next bar in order fill up the gap preceding the next note hit and hit "reverse playback" (using Logic here). That creates a clean "fade-in" instead of the usual moving-finger-noise when used on acoustic guitar recordings (which is what I've been into lately). Instead of the finger noise squeeks kicking in you just hear the fading tail switching direction and leading up inot the next chord/note.

Glad you like it! I didn't even know Joel had been on Joe Rogan, I'll have that check that out.

Thanks so much for the feedback Per!
Using fades is really important to my workflow. I use Ableton but if I'm not mistaken Logic does have a similar feature to stitch various segments of audio together fluidly. I actually use a similar production technique to what you mentioned (reversing into the next clip). Its subtle but hugely effective in making everything more unified. I usually zoom in pretty far into one clip (into the 1/1024 sort of range), to the point you can resolve the individual peaks and valleys of the audio, then I'll manually adjust the clip position so the wave matches up perfectly to the next clip. And often I will cut off and reverse the tail end of a clip to achieve this. Great and useful technique

i love the tone. this sounds fantastic!

Sounds good, I like it.

Pretty darn nifty! Cool stuff!