New song: Grom

Here's my newest song: "Grom"! It's a loud cello trio! I deliberately make the strings rattle a bit to get a more aggressive sound, which was a fun thing to fool around with.



This is actually an older composition: I wrote this one in 2012 to play together with the other cellists of the Kunstorkest, which I was a member of at the time. Since at the Kunstorkest we were supposed to play subtly and rarely truly loudly, I wanted to write something that's super loud and unsubtle, just for the fun of doing something different. At the time I never actually recorded it though, so I did that now and here it is! :)

Sheet music for this one can be found at music.joostvandongen.com. I've also made arrangements for violin and viola, which can also be found there.

PS. Until I took that photo I never realised how evil a cello's bridge can look...

The Daysailer and the Night Cave

I've finished a new song! It's a longer instrumental track with an extensive cello solo towards the end. :)



For this track I had a lot of fun playing around with delay (echo). The rhodes (the piano-like instrument that's heard throughout) has a rhythmic echo at every 8th note. This means that the rhodes is basically constantly playing harmonies with the notes it played just before, which is a pretty interesting effect. At 2:58 I even switch to playing triplets on the rhodes while the delay keeps going in normal 8th notes. So the echo and the original notes have a different rhythm there, which gives an even more interesting effect.

In case anyone wants to give playing it a try, here's the sheet music for the cello part, plus a recording of the song without the cello, to play along to:

• Cello sheet music
• Recording without cello to play along to

This is the longest track I've finished so far and I'm really happy with the result. I hope you enjoy it! ^_^