Faded Grey 3

The third installment from my lo-fi/chillout side project Faded Grey is upon us. Five instrumental, mainly improvised tracks recorded in one session are here to serve as an accompaniment to your daily routine.

I think that by now we (myself and my producer, Hadi) have established the sound and vibe of Faded Grey.

In retrospect, I think Faded Grey 1 was a bit all over the place, singing in one song and overplaying a bit on others. But hey, I cannot completely shed my Greyfade influences, right?

And with Faded Grey 2, I think we were discovering the right ingredients for the project.

But now, we have cemented what Faded Grey should sound like—guitar driven, chillout, and with beautiful relaxing backgrounds and tasty, improvised guitar solos.

The more I record, listen to, and live with Faded Grey, the more I fall in love with it. The reason for this is mainly the freedom it gives me as a musician. I don’t have to prepare a lot in advance and then write a song and adhere to its structure. I just plug in my guitar and play.

As a musician, I can sing (hopefully), write songs, play guitar (rhythm and lead), play bass, and do a little keyboards (to quote Bruce Dickinson, “I’m a two-finger Mozart”). But if I were made to choose only one trait from the aforementioned, I would choose lead guitar, as I love the chaos and freedom that comes with playing, writing, and improvising a guitar solo. Faded Grey allows me to do all that.

I’ve talked about this abundantly in previous Faded Grey blogs—we mainly come in with a clean slate and we start building the songs from scratch, and the options in front of us are limitless. It's a musical picture, if you will, of where we are as musicians during that particular moment when the song is being recorded.

There is a song on the Faded Grey 3 EP called “No Illusion.” While Hadi was doing something on his computer, I was playing the intro to my Greyfade song, “The Illusion.”

I told Hadi, “Let’s lo-fi ‘The Illusion.’”

And so I played the same intro pattern on top of some lo-fi background music, we added a beat, and that’s it. I even used the same notes from the original guitar solo while recording the new solo for “No Illusion.”

“The Illusion” is a metal song, but when arranged and produced differently, it becomes a chillout song entitled “No Illusion.”

Even though it didn’t cross my mind while I was recording the song, during that moment my two musical outlets Greyfade and Faded Grey crossed paths, intertwined, and came full circle.