I stopped documenting the process…. I was too involved in making the piece, so I’ll have to back track a bit.

‘Nostalgias’ is the piece of music I settled on to arrange and rework for iTango, because of the cyclical melody and the slowness.

After writing out parts for various instruments I got some musicians into the recording studio. They all played individually to a click track set at 80 bpm to match the track in the original film. We recorded Bass Guitar (Ric), Bandoneon (Clara), Flute and Piano (me) and acoustic guitar (Frankie).

I had some trouble getting the real instruments to gel with the computer ones ( I tried to add a drum track)… it just didn’t work, and I got a bit disheartened. My tutorial with Tom helped, I started to think more about the structure of the arrangement and lose the effects for a while.

I fiddled with all the tracks to get them all exactly in time, at this point I decided to work with just the bandoneon, bass and piano. I liked the blend of the sounds and I wanted to keep a spacious feel, the other instruments were crowding it.

The film begins with the dancers walking across the floor, discovering it, and I wanted the intro to the sound piece to reflect the uncertainty the dancers were acting out over what was going on with the light, so I attempted to create an abstract slightly disconcerting soundtrack to work with the disjointed editing at this point. I’m quite pleased with this section, and I’d like the rest of the piece to be more like it.

Playing with the intro section is when I started to add effects again, fairly simple ones and no drum section, I cut out some of the interesting sounds made by the clicks and breathing of the bandoneon and added delay and reverb, that was all it seemed to need.