Sandrider

Here's my newest composition: Sandrider! It's a cello trio that revolves around fast arpeggios. At a whopping 5 minutes this one was a LOT of work to record and edit to get it to sound just right. But it was worth it: I'm really happy with the result. :)



Sheet music can be found at music.joostvandongen.com, including arrangements for violin, viola and cello, plus solo versions for if you don't happen to have a cello trio around.

This track was inspired by the way Ernst Reijseger plays in his beautiful song Strabismo Di Venere (from the album Colla Voche). He plays really fast arpeggios there by sweeping over the four strings. I experimented with this way of playing quite a bit and discovered that it also works really well when you play a bit louder than what Reijseger does in Strabismo Di Venere.

I played around with this technique in the live improvisations that djembe player Rene Derks and I did to the game Journey. I liked the sound of that so much that I decided to write a song around this. Hence the name: there's a lot of sandriding in Journey! You can hear the improvised version of this idea at 1:50 in this video of a live performance we did last year.