Jamuary 28, 2021 – 1956 – An Ascent of Manaslu Mountain

This one was fun as I got to go all spacey.. Today’s challenge was “1956” but it didn’t give much more direction than that… so I took some liberties. May 9th, 1956 was witness to the first ascent of Manaslu Mountain, among the Himalaya Mountains, by a Japanese mountain climbing team. Of that team, Toshio Imanishi with sherpa Gyalzen Norbu, were the first to successfully summit the mountain. Here’s what was inspired by that climb:

I’ll explain more in a bit. Gotta go for now!

So, the inspiration behind this track was that Manaslu is one of the big mountains in the Himalayan mountain range and it’s not an easy climb. It doesn’t have the same fame as Everest but it is still a challenge and, to those who like climbing mountains and the riskiness of the adventure, it suits the bill. I don’t know, I’ve never climbed a mountain.

But, back in 1956, the mountain hadn’t been summited by anybody but had been used as a route for the salt trade. The Japanese expedition consisted of a group of climbers and sherpas who made the trek in May of 1956. One of the climbers, Toshio Imanishi and the sherpa Gyalzen Norbu, summited the mountain on May 9th. To think that people can climb these mountains, and that the sherpas are willing to go with them, is an amazing thought. How fleeting the success is (you don’t stay up there for very long) and how small we really are (can you even see someone climbing a mountain from afar?) Inspiring, and terrifying, all at once.

(Read more here http://www.k2news.com/manaslufacts.htm)

Anyway, the thought of being one of the first to do something, to face that unexplored frontier where literally no one had gone before, not only brings up images of space as the final frontier, but even here on Earth there are places that we either haven’t gone yet or, if we try, we face some pretty tough odds.

I let my mind do some freeform thinking: space, time, open, range, piano, notes, alien, Star Trek, mountains, death, cold, snow, nature. The one question I’ve always had in situations like this, when people surmount the seemingly insurmountable, is: does Nature even notice? If a someone or something falls and is inaccessible (let’s hope not), it may not be found for a thousand years or more. In that sense, it is an eternity.

And so, thinking of what it might be like to be facing that challenge, of going where no one has successfully gone before, I started tinkering with the piano. It needed to be spacey, similar to the opening of Star Trek, but it had to be a bit more other-worldly and ethereal. After a bit of fiddling around to find the right sound, I settled for the Electric Piano.

The challenge with playing the Electric Piano is that some of the notes will cancel each out other. So, if I play a lower note and then a higher note after it, sometimes the higher note will cancel the sound of the lower note. I’m not sure if this is because of some phase issues or if it’s a glitch or what the problem is. Whatever the reason, I was able to fix a lot of that in post.

For the playing, I played with contrasts between upper and lower notes. With headphones on you can hear the lower notes move in a ping-pong-like fashion between the right and left channels, while the upper notes stay more central. There is no set pattern or melody, so I doubt I’d be able to reduplicate this track, rather I tried to balance the movement from low notes to high notes while moving up the octaves.

Given the amount of freedom with the playing, there was quite a bit of post work to be done on this one.

Although the initial melody was easy enough to develop, ensuring that everything flowed together was a bit more of a challenge. Whether it was a missed count, a shortened note, or the wrong pitch for what the track was calling for, I had to get into the MIDI notes quite a bit and move them around. Overall, I did three takes and kept the second as it had the most movement throughout the track. Plus, the MIDI notes looked like a mountain range so I figured that was suitable to the theme of the song:

I left the plugin effects at their default values as I found the Electric Piano spacey enough:

So that’s my take on a spacey number about mountain climbing.