My album Video Music draws on the concept of shooting a studio performance video for every track on the album. This playlist gives the audio, but a "video mixtape" of the full album is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iH3oGKviEg

Video Music 1

Video Music (album)

This album contains all eight audio tracks from my latest YouTube videos. I like the concept of creating video and music together. As a music lover, I enjoy it more to watch music being performed, compared to listening back to an audio recording of what once happened in front of the mic. So as a musician and composer, I want to bring people the same experience by filming myself performing my music. In case you get curious about the videos, they are at YouTube.com/perboysen

Video Music 2

This list exposes my current Library Music tracks, that goes to my partner agencies. Tracks eventually end up in media productions like radio, television, film, games etc. I keep this compilation as an instant showroom for my current work in this field.

Media Music - current B2B releases

This playlist mirrors music I have written for licensing to media productions. It's all instrumental and emotional in a way that draws the listener in, rather than the music jumping out at you :-)  When writing I'm leaving emotional and dramatic space for visuals. The recording process is heavily performance oriented. Instruments I use are The Chapman Stick, Electric Cello,  Tenor Saxophone, Alto Flute, EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument), all kinds of guitars (acoustic, strat, tele, lap steel, harp guitar, fretless), Sitar and the Ableton Push pad grid.

Media Music 2019-1

The CD "Stick Street 2" sums up my street busking repertoire. When performing these "guerilla concerts" in public areas I prefer to use the instrument Chapman Stick; a plank with twelve strings, optimized for two hands fretboard tapping. 
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Inventor/luthier/musician Emmett Chapman invented The Stick in 1968 and I am so grateful he did. I met Emmett and performed on the same stage in Los Angeles in 2014. As a musician, it is a very special experience to get to meet the person who designed and created the instrument you love so much. 

If you want to check on The Stick, go to www.stick.com

For CDs, go here!

Stick Street 2 (album)

Improvisation on piano and tenor sax. I started recording the Piano improvisation. Then I recorded an additional take with my Tenor Sax. All done "in The Zone" utilizing the Hans Zimmer Piano and a 1936 Conn 10m with a Theo Wanne Shiva III 8.

2021 Batch Of Media Music

April

Lapsteel guitar and sampler made this recording possible. I draw inspiration from imagining flying a non-engine craft and balancing on uplifting warm thermic airstreams. That emotion here transformed into music.

2012 Batch of Media Music

Thermal Rise

I started fiddeling on my two octaves keyboard to set up this sparse groove with beep-ish tongue-in-cheek vintage synth sounds and an 808. A weird and fun "trap massacre". Then I found this lovely synth pad sound named "Evil Blues" in the gForce Minimonsta and immediately felt an urge to switch the pickups of my 8-stringed axe into single-coils mode and blast off a bluesy improvisation outro. To switch the mood like that, midways through the piece might be useful in the later media application.

2021 Batch of Media Music

Evil Blues Trap

I recorded the sax melody with the AKG clip-on fly mic you see in the picture. The sax is a tenor, a P.Mauriat Influence model. It has a fat and dark sound that I'm balancing with a bright mouthpiece, a metal Theo Wanne Shiva 3 opening #9 armed with a soft Légère American Cut synthetic reed. To get that trumpet-like tone I was playing through an envelope-following Moog filter. The orchestral sounds around the sax were all played on the laptop with software synths.

True Colors

An orchestral piece in a big church room ambiance. The music keeps varying as the landscape does to the traveler. 
(Symphonic instrument libraries and multi-impulse responses are provided by VSL).

2022 Batch of Media Music

Texture Travel

A sensible and proud instrumental track with an accentuated darker scene in the last finishing seconds. Intended for use as an underscore or setting a mood in media production. It starts out with a sparse guitar, then orchestral elements are successively chiming in as we continue the journey.

Cloud People

Silky strings melting a golden soprano sax.

Texture of Romance

A virtual symphonic orchestra placed in the outstanding ambiance of Vienna's "Steinhofkirche".

Stone Temple Meditation

Sax and string ensemble in a monastery church hall.

Serene

Orchestral film/media track with a live electric cello for bass and intro noise.

Tikko Grows Up

An orchestral instrumental piece about an intriguingly mystical place that also brings some familiar elements.

Icy Crust Of Europa

Fastest 30 seconds ever! A soundtrack for a crazy timelapse spot.

Parkour Timelapse

Film music for jumping and climbing like a crazy monkey.

Parkour

Cinematic guitar-based instrumental progressive rock ballad. I played all guitars with the lovely *strandberg Fusion model. Mine is multi-scaled with floating whammy intonation.

Summer

Here's combining progressive in electronic dance music with progressive in guitar-driven rock music. The initial idea was to make a beat with liquid bubbly bass frequencies, like the drumming in west African music, and keep top layers meditative with some pop flavor. I played all guitars with the lovely *strandberg Fusion model. Mine is multi-scaled with floating whammy intonation. There is also a lap steel guitar in the background (Dusenberg Fairytale with two levers).

Clubby Prog

Pipa and Koto plucking ahead in front of a large string orchestra with a classic horn section. A fun twist with a building groove. For the library agencies, there are two alternate mixes: one without the flute intro and one full-length that includes a drumkit basher.

Snake Monger

Classic rock guitar ballad in three sections. Each section has its own vibe and the whole track is constantly building until the grand finale ending chord. Besides the guitars, I'm also playing the Soprano Sax, the Chapman Stick, and the Seaboard here.

2023 Batch of Media Music

December Fog

A one-minute alternate mix to support the common info/commercial spot format. All guitar based in the seventies' idiom

December Fog Minute

(from the CD Stick Street 2)  
A spacious track that plays with interesting counter rhythms. A lot of improvisation recorded by four layers of a twelve-stringed Chapman Stick Guitar SG-12.
For more album info, please follow the Buy link!

Stick Street 2

Astral Stuff

(from the CD Stick Street 2)
This track started out as a popular street busking improvisation with the TC Electronics Flashback #1 pedal. That delay pedal is stereo and my Stick Guitar has two fretboards so I cabled six strings through the pedal's left channel and the other six string through the pedal's right channel. Then I ran the pedal with almost eternal looping feedback and straight 8th note taps on the fifths tuned fingerboard and triplets on the fourths tuned fingerboard. That poly-rhythm is a great recipe for groove and here's what it sounds like. (for recording the piece I duplicated that patch into my AxeFxII for easier recording workflow, but musically the TC pedal sounds just as good)

For more album info, follow the Buy link!

Flashback

(from the CD Stick Street 2)
Here's my instrumental cover of Simon & Garfunkel's lovely tune. I'm playing it on a Chapman Stick Guitar SG-12. This is from my street busking repertoire, not media music for licensing and not of my own originals. All credits to Sim n Garf!


The Sound Of Silence

(from the CD Stick Street 2)
Traditional Swedish ethnic melody from the region of Dalarna. I'm playing it with my wenge Chapman Stick guitar and a volume pedal covering six of the twelve strings. 

Visa från Utanmyra

(from the CD Stick Street 2)
Chilly relax track played on the twelve stringed Chapman Stick Guitar.

Amethyst

(From the CD Stick Street 2)
Naima by John Coltrane, legally represented by Jowcol Music. I hope I did not change too much from John's version to qualify by the standing cover license to record this lovely tune. Here I'm playing it on the my usual 26,5 inch scale Chapman Stick Guitar SG-12. 

Big thanks as well to Fractal Audio Systems for the awesome AxeFx2 amp here modelling a Fender Vibroverb on the six fourths tuned strings and a Fender Bassman on the six fifths tuned strings. 

Naima

(from the CD Stick Street 2)
I played this piece on the Chapman Stick Guitar SG-12 and you can really hear how lovely the Wenge wood is colouring the tone. It took a year of daily playing to get the Wenge into what it sounds like in this recording. A luthier once told me that all good tonewoods do this from being exposed to the vibrations that come from playing the instrument. I also heard about a violin maker that use to put new built instruments in front of loud speakers for a week to achieve the same tonality, sparing  musicians the need to first play it for a year before the magic unfolds.  Anyway, if a Stick gets this good in just one year of playing I can imagine why those old Stradivarius instruments, from around the year 1700, are so expensive today. :-)

In total I have now recorded thirteen tracks for the upcoming "Stick Street #2" CD and that should do well. So no more Stick recordings for a while now. 

1412

The very first Sax note proclaims "This is a love theme". Yes, indeed, a slow and emotional Tenor Sax ballad backed up by Electric Guitar and bowed Doublebass. The soundtrack for dreaming at a café while it is raining outside the window and someone just has let you down. Noir, bible black and bitter!

Sax of Silver

Close your eyes, listen and run with the hunting pack through the vast wilderness! There is Buzzing Acoustic Guitar, Oboe, English Horn, Contrabassoon, Percussion, Synth. A timeless acoustic orchestration that raises proud spirits from all eras.

Wolf

A flying Soprano Sax to capture the dreamy vast magic of the nature reservation Hardangervidda in Norway. Flying with the sparse orchestral waltz rhythms that make fairies dance under the northern lights. And the shiny light never fades; white snow in the winter and sun around the clock in summer.

Hardangervidda Dream

Soaring saxes gloriously flying off like hawks into the stratosphere. Underneath, earth-rooted flutes are jazzing ahead with a bold attitude. All fueled by the energy in a firm drum groove foundation.
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Funky soul groove with saxophone melodies. The possible soundtrack for dynamic activities in a romantic mood. It's possible to cut at 1:30 and use the first part and later part as different cues. Third: one can also fade in from 2:12, which makes for a whimsy start that sets off on a roll quite soon
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Soprano Sax, Tenor Sax, Baritone Sax, Piccolo Flute, Soprano Flute, Alto Flute and Bass Flute. The sax section riff also includes an Alto Sax. The software synth Arturia Moog Modular v3 also plays a big role in this piece.

Wind Hearted Bird

A cleaner and deep mix with the cello and viola to lead the track. The small string section brings a slightly eastern touch, a bit exotic for western ears. Dawn over River Ganges. A distant drum is pounding relaxed heartbeats. A dark and somewhat melancholic vibe, awaiting imminent adventures.

Mumbai Strings

A sweet instrumental piece I played on acoustic guitar and EWI; Bassoon, English Horn, Oboe, Cello. Starting with the guitar, I laid down the instruments one after the other by multitrack recording.

The Leaving Season

From the CD album Stick Street 2. This piece is my instrumental cover version of the song written by Alf Hambe for voice and acoustic guitar. I have always liked the tritone turn ending the verses.

Visa i Molom

This album was recorded in 2007. An interesting fact about this particular year is that for the first time in human history more people are now living in cities, compared to living in other areas on the planet's surface. An equally interesting, as surprising, fact is that this Point Of No Return in the history of global human civilization was hardly mentioned in the media. The monumental ignorance opened me up for this music and it slipped out while the record button was pressed. It also had me running around with recording gear to catch all kinds of urban environment ambiances right there at the cusp, where the wheel of time changes direction after about ten thousand years of "minority civilization".

The twelve instrumental pieces are solo performance work, played on the instruments Alto Traverse Flute, Tenor Sax, Fretless Sustainiac Guitar, Stratocaster Twang Bar Guitar and Akai EWI 4000s. EWI stands for "Electronic Wind Instrument" and is to be played similar to a sax or a clarinet. I play both the EWI's built-in synthesizer sounds and use it as a MIDI controller for a virtual instrument I create. One of my favorite EWI sampler patches is an electric guitar multisample set I created from recordings I of with my own electric guitar and tube amplifier plus speaker cabinets; Stratocaster with floating twang bar mechanics - SOVTEK MiG-60 - Marshall Lead Series 1x12". 

Most songs were created and recorded as instant improvisations with the real-time sampling/looping software Mobius. I personally regard also Mobius as my instrument, since I'm really experiencing that I'm playing Mobius with my foot controller board while also playing the above-mentioned instruments with my hands. 

Photo and album cover by Danne Eriksson, www.erikssonsson.se.

Civitas Urbanus

Camelride Slumber

Reflecting the vibe of contemporary science and technology. This production music offers media producers a fast and reliant music solution. License is provided by AMG Scandinavia, just follow the link on the BUY button.

Science & Technology Music vol 1

Texture

Searching For Truth

If you are interested in watching the videos, here's a link to "a visual mixtape" of the entire Video Music album: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iH3oGKviEg

I saw this ferry stop on a floating dock in the River and walked out on it. Since it was between tours there were no other people around. The river and the central city skyline made a massive impact. I thought the vibe would be great for a panorama video backdrop and panned the view with my GoPro8 camera, using its horizon stabilizer. The spooky dusk vibe inspired me to try making some music in Phrygian mode and I used the Push 1 to play an orchestral mockup. I worked out a nice ballad style melody theme through the chord changes and improvised a guitar solo and a tenor sax solo with the EWI.

The Phrygian mode has a certain evil side to it, that I like. Neither minor nor major, it stays in a grey zone that you normally just pass by on your way somewhere else. Much like dusk, the shortly flickering passage between day and night. But Phrygia nails you to the coffin while the same notes keep coming back in ever-shifting series of various configurations. And Phrygian can be extremely dissonant. I think listeners may instinctively experience these characteristics as an instant threat, thus causing the well-known “flavor of evil” we know Phrygian for.

In this track, I’m playing my EWI loaded with a SWAM tenor sax patch by AudioModeling and my 8-stringed *strandberg guitar with a slightly rough flintstone pick through an Axe-Fx-III. I also played the eighth notes based bass line with this guitar. The spiccato strings are from Spitfire Audio’s sampler library Symphonic Chamber Strings. Finally, the virtual drum kit I slapped maestro Magnus Brandell’s MIDI files over is the Superior Drummer 3 from Toontrack.

In early May 2020, OddGrooves.com shared a generous gift with the worldwide musician’s community, the Lockdown Grooves Pack. A free pack of drum kit performances by master drummer Magnus Brandell. Being a long-time OddGroves fan I grabbed the download right away and found this pack-of-drummings extremely inspiring for a song idea I was working on. I had already been using OddGrooves for some time, and this pack locked in so nicely with this Phrygian mode instrumental piece. Magnus Brandell plays the drums with a deep understanding of the story-telling aspects of musical performance. Ghost hits, fills, and transitions are not just thrown in at specific points, they are all parts of a continuously evolving rhythm vibe through-out the long drum kit performance. Exactly the type of drumming that inspires me as a player and composer. I felt how my sax and guitar improvisations along this track in C Phrygian came out like “standing on the shoulders of giants”… he, he… in this case the shoulders of Drummer Giant Brandell :-) Thank you, Magnus. Good job!

OddGrooves announced a contest, “to support musicians around the world to go creative during the Corona Lockdown”, and I submitted this instrumental track. A week later I was informed that my piece had won the contest, sharing the highest rank prize with three other submissions.

Video Music

Yin and Yang at Dusk

Yin And Yang At Dusk

If you are interested in watching the videos, here's a link to "a visual mixtape" of the entire Video Music album: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iH3oGKviEg

One day I took a walk and came about this fascinating environment. I hauled out my GoPro and shot a minute. Then, the day after, I made some music to make the vibe more explicit. Amazing how much fun you can have with software :-)

Look Down a Hole

Look Down A Hole

If you are interested in watching the videos, here's a link to "a visual mixtape" of the entire Video Music album: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iH3oGKviEg

I shot this space rock video in 4k, and I hope you're enjoying the clear visuals as much as I do! I'm playing a handful of rare modern extended range instruments in this music. Below are details and links:

8-stringed electric guitar *strandberg Boden.
strandbergguitars.com/product-category/guitar/8-string-guitar/

Chapman Stick Grand. 12 strings (6+6) on a 36" plank.
stick.com/instruments/grand/

Sitar. 18-stringed Ravi Shankar model.
Thanks to Arun Uchila for helping me to get this instrument!

Akai EWI 5000 - Electronic Wind Instrument. A Japanese wonder!
www.akaipro.com/products/ewi-series.
The oboe sound is modeled, through my playing, by the SWAM software developed by the nice Italians at
audiomodeling.com

Electric Cello.
thinkns.com/instrument/ns-design-electric-cello/

Tim Donahue Signature Electric Fretless Harp Guitar.
www.timdonahue.com/harpguitars.html

Amplification:
For the Stick Bass, the Harp Guitar, and the 8-stringed Guitar I was using an Apollo Twin USB audio interface, from Universal Audio, armed with the plugins Ampeg SVTVR Classic and Suhr PT100 ("PT" = Pete Thorn).
www.uaudio.com/audio-interfaces/apollo-twin-usb.html.

The Cello was played through a Fractal Audio Axe-Fx II with MIDI pedal instant live control of delay effects, recorded as part of the instrument performance.

Uranian Fireflies

If you are interested in watching the videos, here's a link to "a visual mixtape" of the entire Video Music album: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iH3oGKviEg 

I shot the time-lapse video at Gothenburg harbor with my GoPro8 camera. Initially, it came out too short for composing any music that would make sense. I got around that challenge by looping the video and automizing the color profile in the video post-production phase to roughly mimic a high-speed full day time-lapse. Then it was possible to underscore emotional in the picture with music, and I played different orchestral music sampler libraries on my Push 1 rubber pads frame to make it happen.
lyrics
(Not sung here, but inspirational to this work)

Red Sky in the Morning
is the Sailor's Warning
Red Sky in the Night
Is the Sailor's Delight

(the high statue shade to the left on the other side of the river - if you watch the video or the Track Art - is "the Fisherman's Widow", a woman looking west over the sea and hoping her husband will return alive from his dangerous work period, that could last for days on one trip)

Red Sky In The Morning

If you are interested in watching the videos, here's a link to "a visual mixtape" of the entire Video Music album: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iH3oGKviEg

Some people love it when a song mixes several musical genres. I guess I'm with them because making this instrumental track was the most fun I've had in a long time! :-)

Here I'm playing the eight-stringed electric guitar, the electric cello, and the EWI - Electronic Wind Instrument - for this jam loaded with a Bass Clarinet patch from the Italian guys behind SWAM (Audio Modeling). But there is also the Glitch Stuff, ie a bunch of tape delay algos that I control with foot pedals for the guitar sound. You don't see the pedals in the video, but that sound is there for the whole second half of the track. When the drums go away I'm creating the beats with this pedals controlled glitch machinery. Ie an expression pedal to adjust feedback of three, cross-wired and partly interactive, delays, and a switch to "punch holes" into the bouncing loops if the texture should become too dense.

Metal Dub Jazz

It was such a lovely gloomy-dark-rainy December night, so I grabbed my trusty old Lumix camera to catch some of the vibes for making an instrumental music video. And this track is the music I created for the project. 

I like the concept of creating video and music together. As a music lover, I enjoy it a thousand times more watching music being performed, compared to just listening back to an audio recording of what once happened in front of the mic. So as a musician and composer, I want to bring people the same experience by filming myself performing my music. 

My videos are public at https://www.youtube.com/perboysen

Dark December

Tenor Sax and 8-stringed Guitar. Instrumental original by, and with, Per Boysen. 

"Bells" for the bell-like guitar chords formed by the wandering of fifths intervals over a G-tone pedal note. "Boden" is the model of my modern electric guitar. The sax is much older, built in 1936. The mouthpiece is also old, manufactured in 1977, mainly by hand, supported by the very first machines in mouthpiece production. It took me a long time and a lot of experimentation with other gear before I realized how brilliant my old tenor sax setup is. I have a handful of modern top tenor mouthpieces, but this old one clearly stands out as the most playable. Isn't it is amazing that modern science has not yet caught up?

Tenor sax: Conn 10M "Ladyface", pre-war (1936).
Mouthpiece: Otto Link STM 9* (original vintage 1977, "early Babbitt" build).
Reed: Legere Studio 1,5 (synthetic). 
Mic: AKG C 414 B-TL II
Mic preamp: UA Apollo Twin USB (running SSL channel strip and bus compressor).
Guitar: *strandberg Boden 8.

Bells of Boden

Bells Of Boden

Dreamchasers, that is what we are, we musician nerds that always fail to manifest in sound what we keep hearing inside. And we try again, and again, and again... We never reach our goals, but keep searching because the journey is magical and totally worthwhile!

In this piece, I play the Tenor Sax and the Soprano Sax with three different guitars. For two of the guitars, I use interactive effects, ie sound-design processing that you play simultaneously with the instrument. First, the white Stratocaster could do all that background feedback screaming due to a certain pedal, the  DigiTech FreqOut. Then the 8-stringed guitar was played through a couple of delay units where I controlled the "tape loop return level" with an expression pedal, ie allowing me to freeze chunks of audio and have it bouncing around. I aimed at playing just the first bar of fingerpicking, and freeze it until the next chord comes around. The bouncing pad-like sound sometimes came to drag or speed a bit towards the song tempo, which I actually liked and kept like that. Generally, there is a lot of improvisations and first-takes here. For example, I had planned to play the Soprano Sax to simply double up the Tenor Sax melody one octave higher, but as I was recording I got the feeling that "hey, this may turn out a bit boring" so I started to improvise different counter-melodies in the hope of getting some fresh vibes into the music. Luckily it worked. :-) Funny that the parts I like the most were not composed, they just happened.

Dreamchasers

I felt a desire to combine the Stick Guitar and the Soprano Sax in a relaxed and mesmerizing piece, and this is what I came up with. An important part of the orchestration is the live-looping of tape delays that I perform with an expression pedal while playing the Chapman Stick Guitar. I'd say that Stick performance recorded most aspects of the tune in just one first take. The tape delay looping of the six melody strings (played with the right hand, while keeping up finger-style accompaniment with left hand on the second 6-strings group) creates a kind of slow granular cloud atmosphere behind my melody playing. Much more intriguing than "the common synth pad", if you ask me :-)  In fact, the Stick provided three musical parts simultaneously in one single performance (such a great instrument the STick is, I just love it!). Then the sax overdubbing the melody and the bass accentuating the deeper end is just "a bit more of what already is there". Hope you like it :-)

Saxophone Amethyst

It was love at first sight. It was just irresistible! I knew I had to bring it into a music video. I'm talking about the junk container,  featured in this video. These days I keep walking around with a GoPro camera in my pocket to assemble cool environments for music videos. I've decided to make music together with video now, rather than just sharing audio recordings. This is because a video where you can watch the music being performed makes much more sense to me. And maybe others think the same way?

This album's 8 videos, and more, can be watched at www.youtube.com/perboysen

Anyway, here's another recording layering of several instruments in front of the camera. I started with the acoustic guitar, added drums, electric piano, electric guitar, 5-stringed electric fretless bass, tenor sax, soprano sax, and synth. The inspiration was the still pictures I took on a walk around the island one afternoon. I especially like the sound of three unison layered tenor saxes with this particular mouthpiece that I decided to use. Sometimes when layering sounds the magic vanishes, but this combination of tenor sax/mouthpiece/reed turned out great for layering. I topped that sound with one soprano sax voice one octave above the three tenors.

Another "lucky layer" in this piece is the unison electric piano behind the electric guitar.

Dissolvement

Media composer, performing musician, and Live  Looping artist. 

I compose and produce recordings for media post-production, typically to be used in television, film, games, and work together with a number of production music libraries that handle the licensing. This SoundCloud account mirrors the last three hours of my growing production music catalog. 

A rather new outlet for me is to play solo concerts with the Chapman Stick instrument (profile photo) at churches here in Sweden. 

I'm also a dedicated Live Looping enthusiast. Live Looping is the act of instantly sampling and remixing oneself while playing acoustic/electric instruments. It's like performing live electronics without any prerecorded parts, or like Musique Concrète performed in real-time (rather than cutting and splicing audio tape or editing samples). My point is to create the music as I go - improvising sound as well as music and remix treatments in a process of instant composing. My dream for Live Looping is to bridge the gap between composer, conductor, musician, DJ, and remix artist. 

Besides patching live electronics I also play fretless Harp Guitar, normal Guitar,  Chapman Stick, Alto and Soprano Flutes, Tenor Sax, Soprano Sax, EWI, fretless electric Bass, Lapsteel Guitar, and Electric Cello. I tend to consider the whole shebang my personal "meta-instrument".  Mechanical instruments and electronic processing techniques all blur into one fat and messy palette that I use to paint music on the time canvas.

Per Boysen

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