Beginning
WaterFall first started as an instrumental project in March 2022, a fusion of many different genres and mostly guitar-based improvised music. Sometimes me and my friend Daniel (playing the drums) would jam around, recording various ideas live, not worrying much about the direction of the music. We also played Bach and Paganini for practice, concentrating on getting our technique and timing to an acceptable level. As we continued playing the ideas were growing and music was evolving, becoming more cohesive, less improvisational.
We still did not have a name and there were no plans to start singing until it happened spontaneously. I would start humming along with some of our improvisations, being awfully off pitch, and feeling totally insecure about any lyrics that would come to me. That went on for a few months.
One day, (Sep 19 2022 to be precise), this arpeggio idea was improvised on the guitar, which I called “Running Water” because of its flow:
I realized that there is something to it. I did not feel that I was playing the guitar. Instead, I felt that I was being played and the Music was being played through me. I realized that it will be a song – still not knowing what it would be about.
The Vision
I would continue playing it over and over again, humming along, becoming comfortable with chord changes, but still unsure about what I could say in this song. A couple days later I entered into a deep meditative state while listening to this recording on repeat. That’s when it happened.
I saw a vision – a Waterfall sustaining a tribe disconnected from a civilized world. But it was a dark vision – the water was drying out, and villagers started dying from thirst. I felt their anguish. I felt the tears flowing from my eyes.
The song now had a different name – Waterfall. Lyrics started coming to me without much effort, and the story of the Waterfall was being born.
The song, still instrumental, now evolved into this:
We still did not have a name for our band, and gave ourselves a week to come up with something. When the week was over, I was still uncertain. I started meditating with a clear intention – finding the name here and now. And I felt a clear Voice telling me that I already have the name. That’s how the WaterFall band started.
There was a lot of instrumental music improvised in the past couple months, and so we did not lack material – it was a matter of creating the story, deciding on the flow of the album. Because I knew exactly what the album was about, there was little resistance finding the lyrics to fit the music we had.
Practice
At the same time we simply could not stop improvising, writing 1 or 2 new songs every single week. I was growing in confidence as a singer-songwriter (still being off-pitch most of the time, but confident that it would get better with time). Writing lyrics and singing them did not seem as embarrassing. But I was also aware that it would take quite a bit more time to get our music to the level I was hearing in my head: besides my pitch being off, my pronunciation required a lot more work (English is my second language), our timing was still poor, and I had no idea how to record, produce and mix our songs properly. So we were prepared for a long journey ahead.
By the end of October 2022 first demo of Waterfall was recorded live:
I did not see a point trying to produce or mix things better until we could play better, so we concentrated on practicing hard every single day. When new ideas would come to me, we would record them quick and rough and leave them for later improvement.
New Phase
Four months later we have the first album fully written, and another 20 songs ready for the future releases. I also continued studying recording and production techniques. And so we enter into the next phase – recording – having done all the preparation necessary.
Within the next couple weeks I will be sharing various demos that we recorded and produced recently. At the same time we continue working on recording our first album – “The Fall” – telling the original story behind the WaterFall project.
This blog will also serve as a space for me to share the news related to WaterFall as well as my personal thoughts on music and life in general.
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