"100 Years of Solitude"
Written, recorded, and mixed by JT Martenz
Location: Worldwide
100 Years of Solitude is by far my most adventurous, lengthy, and challenging project yet. I began working on it in September 2023, and It was released on January 1, 2025.
I made it my goal to focus all of my energy into this one song, in order to find out the best possible result that I'm capable of.
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I collaborated with many session musicians and friends from around the world on this song. The string quartet is from Ukraine, the vocalist and drummer are both from the same band based out of Italy, the backing vocalist is from Sweden, and the bass player is currently touring with a legendary Swedish metal band that I've been a fan of for years.
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I have learned so much by working and communicating with musicians while making this song, crossing time zones and language barriers, all for the common goal of creating music. ​
"Sundown"
Written, recorded, and mixed by JT Martenz
Location: SJN Church
2024
This song was recorded live at Saint John Newman Church with no overdubs, and very minimal post processing and mixing. The entire multitrack session was then recorded onto a Ampex MMX-1000 16-channel tape recorder, and then each individual track was converted to digital again for further mixing in Logic Pro.
The idea was to make the recording as authentic to the 50s / 60s jazz recordings done by Rudy Van Gelder for Blue Note Records.
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I achieved this by utilizing live recordings, condenser microphone bleed, room reverb, compression, and exclusively recording the upright bass with a condenser microphone, how RVG did it back in the day. I also made sure we were using a grand piano with microphones placed unusually close to the strings, in order to get that peculiar Blue Note piano sound.
