©Will Spicher 2007
This instrumental draws its inspiration from a very big part of my life that has never found its way into my music before: mountain biking. I am fortunate to live close to one of Illinois' best trail systems: Farmdale Reservoir. This month I logged my one-hundredth ride there and decided to celebrate by dedicating a song-page to it.
Don't get me wrong; I am no shredder! In fact, I often ride alone precisely because I am too slow for pretty much anyone I ride with. Nevertheless, I keep riding because I love it--the air, the dirt, the trees, splashing through the streams, slipping through mud puddles, and sudden rain. Though I ride for exercise, I ride more for stress-management, solitude and endorphins.
With that, I would like to extend my appreciation to the Peoria Area Mountain-Bike Association for their hard work and advocacy of the truly wonderful sport of mountain-biking.
Below is a link to an image map. I took a ride with my GPS and my camera and took pictures of my favorite spots. Enjoy the tour.
Being a hopeless geek, I also found a way to assemble the pictures with the music into a Flash slide-show:
I have been sitting on the bass line for a few years and have always enjoyed playing it but lacked ideas for giving it enough variation and motion to become a song. That changed when I picked up the T5, dropped the low E to D, and played the bass line into the Jamman, and started playing along. The chorus practically jumped off the frets. As I thought more about it, I drew inspiration from one of my favorite guitar solos of all time: Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 by Pink Floyd, where the bass is doing something in D pentatonic while the organ runs through about every chord in the book, and the guitar plays this amazing lead. (The trained ear will hear the similarities rather quickly. So I admit the inspiration, though I don't share the song's viewpoint toward teachers, education, or the rest of the world.) So I went with it and laid down chords almost at random and had an awful time later remembering how they went as I wrote the guitar part. But I listened to scratch tracks until it became embedded in my subconscious, and, with time and patience, the guitar line pretty much wrote itself. The real trouble was with the super-shredder riff (1:50-1:60) which was really over my head, so I had to play it at 75% speed until I was ready to try it at full tempo.
For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come. 1 Tim 4:8
...God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. 1 Tim 6:17
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WillSongs++
published 29-Sep-2007
updated 29-Sep-2007