The Lighthouse Keeper is a long-term 'Progressive Rock' music project that hopes to explore how the potentially harsh conditions of living in deep space, by a futuristic space-faring mankind, can still give rise to the all too common emotions of loneliness, depression and alienation.
When complete, it will be a series of interconnected songs that charts the journey of the 'Lighthouse Keeper' from the lonely Space Lighthouse, 14 million light-years from Earth, back to his home. A long journey for a troubled mind...
This is a long-term Progressive Rock project. This is some of the background information that was attached to the eponymous opening track together with other observations and information about how the project has developed.
On the 25th February 2016, an idea came into my head for a song involving the concept of a lighthouse in space. What would it be like to be in the back of beyond, all alone in deep space? It seemed an interesting concept to explore but I wasn't aware of how big the idea might get.
Lyrics followed and then musical ideas involving a degree of orchestration to denote the expanse of space and incorporating strings and brass mixed together with drums, bass, synthesizers and electric guitar.
It took just over 1.5 years (560 days), to produce this 16.5 minute monster. The track acted as an apprenticeship in the fields of recording, mixing and simple mastering. The original rough demo was completed by December 2016 but final construction only truly began in January 2017, with everything being re-recorded.
The track itself isn't particularly lyric heavy, with instrumental sections very much in keeping with a larger Prog Rock piece. Since it is quite long at 16.5 minutes, I suggest listeners settle down and hopefully lose themselves in Deep Space for a while. :-)
The original idea is now expanding into a series of interconnected pieces of music and the titles of the songs are :-
Acoustic and electric guitar, and most of the vocals, are played, or sung, by myself and are recorded via a studio microphone or digital interface to the PC.
Since I am doing this alone as a home recording project, some of the instrumentation and vocalisations employed in these tracks are virtual, ie. they are pre-recorded elements (individual notes) of an instrument or voice that can be played by a composer or song-writer via a MIDI keyboard. These software-based 'virtual instruments' even try to emulate some of the playing techniques used by a performer. For example, there may be several bowing articulations recorded for a violin and it might be a solo violin or in concert with other stringed instruments to form an ensemble sound.
There are also synthesizers and other virtual instruments that could never exist in the physical world and so the possibilities are endless to create interesting sounds, or hybrids of sounds, that can be played as part of a piece of music.
All this is brought together using Steienberg Cubase Artist 9.5, mixed and finally mastered for subsequent release on the Soundcloud platform.
I created this site to act as a hub for information about this project. It also gives me a chance to indulge in experimenting with modern website design. As such it uses W3.CSS, a modern CSS framework with built-in responsiveness for different devices like tablets and phones. Hopefully then, this website should work across all platforms. For the technically minded, it uses standard CSS only (No jQuery or JavaScript library). Repeat visitors may see some layout changes as I keep 'tweaking it'. ;-)
On the 25th February 2016, an idea came into my head for a song involving the concept of a lighthouse in space. What would it be like to be in the back of beyond, all alone in deep space?
Lyrics followed and then musical ideas involving orchestration to denote the expanse of space and incorporating strings and brass mixed together with synthesizers and electric guitar.
Just over 1.5 years later (560 days), this 16.5 minute monster is finally ready. This track has acted for me as an apprenticeship in recording, mixing and simple mastering. The original rough demo was completed by December 2016 but final construction only truly began in January 2017, with everything being re-recorded.
The track itself isn't particularly lyric heavy, with instrumental sections very much in keeping with a larger Prog Rock piece. Since it is quite long at 16.5 minutes I suggest listeners settle down and hopefully lose themselves in Deep Space for a while. :-)
A big shout-out to Len Rice for guidance and encouragement during the recording of this track. You taught me how to listen critically and got me up to speed with some technical stuff - Cheers :-)
@lenrice
The Lighthouse Keeper features orchestral strings and brass, acoustic and electric guitar, various synthesizers, concert harp, drums and bass guitar.
The idea is to use some of the melodic ideas and instrumentation from 'The Lighthouse Keeper' in subsequent tracks, to add a degree of connectivity between the pieces of music.
The Lighthouse Keeper - P Goodrich 25th Feb 2016
And the thing I hate most is the silence
Although noise is all around me
The noises of my trade
For Im a lighthouse keeper
keeping the ships from harm
Alone, nobody else on my watch
So I tend the beacon
To warn away the unwary
from the hazards they might face
Isolation, the monotony of it all
hopes and dreams suspended
as the days and months and years tick by
------
Work to be done, its not easy
despite the automated systems
and the memory banks of the AI portal
14 million light-years from Earth
in a backwater of the universe
waiting and waiting and waiting to be relieved
A good posting they said and I believed them
not knowing how it would gnaw away at your soul
until you just, want to scream and scream and scream
Inside
Inside
Inside
------
Alone, I feel so alone
despite all the advances of our race
you cannot put a price
on the sound of a voice
or the touch of a hand
After completing The Lighthouse Keeper, I decided to do a music video based on it. This was partly promotional as video platforms like YouTube are very popular and partly to see if I could put together a 16.5 minute video together using video footage/stills from NASA and those generous people who upload video clips onto Videvo.net.
The video was released on the 28th Novermber, 2017 and is available on YouTube. I'm fairly pleased with the outcome ;-)
The video link below take you to my YouTube account where the music video is hosted. This will open in a new tab or window that you can simply close when finished to return to this website.
