This one's something of a salvage job. I'd had multiple notions this week, each of which increased this track's level of difficulty, and ultimately threw out both the strongest motif, and the initial thought behind the track. Does it work anyway? As a mood piece, it works better than the original idea.

I'd read a piece this week arguing that tempo consistency is a problem in contemporary music; while that may or may not be true, it's interesting that hits of the classic analog recording era had notable variations in tempo--not accidentally, but in response to the feel of the music. (A drummer might slow down slightly before accelerating into a dramatic chorus, for example.) So my thought had been to allow tempo variations, which led to variations in time signature, and which led to pieces that...sounded like they all belonged to different songs.

Adding to the complexity, I decided to use the microtonal guitar, so the idea of "key" became more complicated. Not only is this instrument microtonal, but it's also fretted in just intonation intervals, 24 to the 2/1. So the notes are a lot closer together, and chords are much more difficult than on a 12TET guitar.

Collaging the sections together with the different tempi just ended up sounding wrong, so I normalized to a reasonable sounding 90 bpm (though this is kind of a half-time piece, so it's more like 45 bpm). Then I added a fourth track to fill in gaps. Finally, I had to punt on the strongest theme, a 76 bpm fingerpicking exercise in 9/8. That'll have to go somewhere else, eventually, as it didn't fit at all with the rest of this piece.

Signal chain: microtonal Tele Deluxe into UA Volt (with a little clipping here and there), Ableton Live's Roar plugin on the neck-pickup-only track, some convolution reverb, and multiband compression/eq on the mix.

The title comes from the elevation of the summit of Scotland's Mount Scaraben, 626 meters.

A bit of a speedtrash for the final track of the year. Thank you to Rain25 for the tip about automating a low filter pass - I tried that and I like the result.

For this final track, I wanted to capture the feeling of a chaotic flight, running away from something, form someone, maybe from oneself.

It was a fun weekly streak 2025. For those who join, see you on Weekly Beats 2026!