Memories of Arabia

So here I'm currently writing a piece with that middle-eastern feel, I did about two minutes of it, but I feel I could add tons more of stuff to make it better. All suggestions are very much welcome.

Here it is: http://www.box.net/shared/i9qyx2i9uo

Nicely done but I can't recognize any "Arabic" 'makam' (key)..

What you have done here is an occidental view of the Arabic music.. (I'm not saying that's wrong).. but if you want an authentic thing you should study oriental keys 'makamat'

fro few examples you can look in youtube for "marcel khalifa " ; "oum kalthoum " , "Taqsim oud" ...

Well, I used a spanish gypsy scale (thanks to Adamich for letting me in on this), it has that certain sound, its like half of arabic scale, and half phrygian mode. It's fairly hard to make this sound good to people who are from mid east I know, but thanks for help.

hey phant, very neat production there, nice flowing and orchestration, it's pretty neat.

it has an ambient feel to it, there are nice melodies and the drums has a nice dramatic effect, it had an arabian feel to it, so i think you were successful there, if you want to get richer sound you could improvise with other ethincal instruments to blur that orchestral sound=western feel.

i would look for stronger melodies, even look for ones with authentic feel to it, listen to um-cul-thum, she is the best arab singer of all time. the orchestrating in this genre is actually more simple, they almost don't use chords, and everyone plays the melody in unison, so you get a very thick, over dramatic sound(talking about mid-eastern orchestras).

I really like your orchestration. I think it would sound really good if you had your cellos double the V1 part when the V1 has the melody. It will create a richer sound. If you are worried about the cello part, just make it a divisi. I really like it though!

Patrick

Well, I used a spanish gypsy scale (thanks to Adamich for letting me in on this), it has that certain sound, its like half of arabic scale, and half phrygian mode. It's fairly hard to make this sound good to people who are from mid east I know, but thanks for help.

i'm not from mid east :P but that's the music i've studied.. i'm actually translating few master classes on the subject from arabic to english ..i'll be posting them soon here. 'cause even the tuning of the occidental instruments (chello, violin...) is different from the western standers if you are working on keys like "Bayati" ,"Mhayar Sikah" or "Hijaz"

you can find a nice and clean introduction on the subject here: http://www.maqamworld.com/maqamat.html