Nostalgic Music

How Thinking about the Past would Sound Like.

Today I want to share with you this short piece I wrote today.

I was thinking about a few things that happened to me in the past, and I felt pretty nostalgic. It was a new feeling for me because I usually never really think about the past.

I look forward to the present moment and the future, but the past never bothers me … until today.

Obviously, I grabbed my guitar and tried to transform this feeling into music with almost everything that inspired me.

This is the music I first played.

To make it more nostalgic and deep, I decided to play it in Drop D tuning, and I used a lot of reverb and delay.

Enjoy it

The Video

Chords, Melody, and Sound

The Chords

One of the things I love the most is to keep things simple. Nostalgic music will never sound rhythmically busy or full of chords, so I had to come up with few chords and a simple melody.

The Drop D tuning is perfect because it gives depth and sustains the melody and beautiful resonating chords.

The chord progression is D – G – A – D – A – D for the first section; then the music will change in B minor with the chord progression going as follows, Bm – G – D – G – D – A – D.

There is also an outro with a different chord progression that goes Bm – A – G.

As you can see, the chords are pretty basic, so the melody really does it all.

The Sound

I used a ton of delay and reverb to sustain the melody and chords for this nostalgic music.

One of the most important things, when you play something simple, is sustained. If the notes decay too quickly, you will feel like feeling in the gaps with other notes making the music way too busy.

With delay and reverb, the notes sound bigger and with sustain.

I usually take the effects of my pedalboard Boss GT10. The reverb is a Tape rev, and the delay is an analog delay.

Also, I am plucking the strings using a 45-degree angle so that the tone is smooth, rounded, and extremely sweet.

Enjoy this video, guys.