This album continues my first improvised album despite many things were done differently. The first Ex Tempore was totally improvised piano album without any planning beforehand or whatsoever: no tempo, no time signatures etc. This time I decided fixed tempo and time signatures for songs beforehand, but still didn’t compose anything before recording.
At which point a song begins to be a composition? With my workflow it’s not a clear cut line. Approximately about 80% of my compositions get started as a result of improvising. The remaining 20% is mainly programmed (or rarely even coming from my dreams). Either way, usually I keep improvising some piece before I “lock” all the included notes. Then I often write it on MIDI sequencer and after that I’m ready to record.
With this album I skipped most of these steps. Before recording I did improvise a few starting bars of chords and melodies to sketch the basis to start with, but the rest was done during the recording. However, obviously I could only record one instrument at a time. When I started to record drums and bass jouhikko, I had to listen the piano recording a few times and then try to play some fitting tracks on top of it. (Except on Ex Tempore 10 I recorded bass jouhikko improvisation first.)
With piano and drums I made MIDI recordings along with the audio recordings. This enabled me to fix some little mistakes and quantise drums before I re-recorded their audio again. All in all, this project was not as purely “Ex Tempore” as the first one, but it was still a unique experiment of doing things in a way I haven’t done before.
Aeroll 