Spotlight Licks: Artemia

This edition of "Spotlight Licks" is brought to you by the band "Artemia" by way of their super musician drummer Michael "Dork" Dinkins. Gonna let Dork take it from here.


Greetings from Artemia-land. When we were recording our song "Ghost of the Avalanche," we decided to add an impromptu keyboard lead to the latter half of the instrumental bridge. It was written and recorded in about an hour--- however, because I played drums on the song and there were two guitar parts, we never incorporated into our live set until recently. Because the members of Artemia all play multiple instruments, we decided to play some musical chairs where we would do acoustic/clean/piano versions of our songs to open ourselves up to playing different venues... with our guitarist Eric playing drums and myself on keys. So because the lead was written and recorded on the fly and then never revisited, I had to sit down and learn what I had played. Once that was done, I decided to tab out the lead for guitar so that we could add it to our live set on guitar.

If you listen to the song, you'll hear the main theme which is a melody based off the D minor 7 chord. For the instrumental bridge, we thought it would be cool to modify the main theme and play it in various keys and modes first soft and clean and then repeat it hard and heavy. So the lead actually follows each of these key/mode changes every four bars and eventually works back around to the D minor 7 theme for the final chorus.


For the music nerds, the lead begins at time 4:09 and follows this progression: D minor 7... A minor 7... B minor 7... C dominant 7... F dominant 7... E flat major... F# minor 7... C# minor 7... and then the chorus comes in with the D minor 7 again.



As I am not a guitarist and the lead was initially written on keyboard, I have no practical knowledge of how this will actually translate to guitar--- parts of it may be very easy, but other sections may be extremely difficult. Couple that with the fact that, while the song is actually in 4/4, there is a poly-rhythm occurring to give the impression that there's a loop of 5/4 - 5/4 - 6/4. So if you're looking for a challenge or an experiment or are simply interested in jamming what some of the locals have come up with--- here it is.

First half: http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c324/HeirToRuin/Avalanchelead1.jpg

Second half: http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c324/HeirToRuin/Avalanchelead2.jpg

The song: http://artemia.bandcamp.com/track/ghost-of-the-avalanche

SIDE NOTE: The guitars are tuned to standard pitch with a "drop d" tuning.

On a side note Dork's band L.I.E. is retiring for now and are playing a farewell show at Sky City on 11-11-11 (national metal day). If you are 21 and up you should go check it out. Artemia is Dork's baby now. Check out their new cd.