Ron Franklin Music
Songwriter Guitarist Performer
Welcome to the Fan Page for Mysterious Deep!
If you purchased the CD or a download card, your QR code gives you access to this page.
On this page you will find details on the creation of the pieces and videos of many of the recordings - so scroll on down!
You can download or stream the 24 bit 44.1 KHz WAV files in the player below or just stream and listen from a number of sources:
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About Ron Franklin
I'm a San Diego - based guitarist/singer/songwriter with a lifelong love and passion for music. I have a Master of Music degree in Guitar Performance and teach Guitar and Ukulele for the San Diego College of Continuing Education .
About the Album
Mysterious Deep is an album of my performances of original music for solo guitar I have composed over the last 10 years or so – it includes 13 total compositions played on six different instruments with five different tunings.
Buy the CD!
Synchronized music notation on SoundSlice.com
About the piece Mysterious Deep
Mysterious Deep is the namesake track of the album. It was originally created for the soundtrack of the Next Generation Yoga DVD “Whale Yoga for Kids with Jodi Komitor” published by Gaiam. It began as a pure improvisation and was released in that form as a single which has since found its way onto more than 45 different online Guitar albums available on Spotify and other streaming sites.
I subsequently transcribed what I had improvised and learned it as a piece I now perform. It’s interesting to listen to the differences between the two recordings.
The initial improvisation is a bit slower and has a few more “pregnant pauses” in the flow. These come across as intense and emotional in the original recording – but they exist because I was creating the piece on the fly and unsure of what comes next.
The recording on the CD is the performance after transcribing and learning the piece. It has a more direct, less tentative sound because I know what is supposed to come next! Either way, I love the emotion and architecture of it. You can listen to the difference between the two versions here:
Original Improvisation
New Recorded Version
Whale Yoga for Kids
Five of the thirteen tracks on the album were originally created for a DVD project called "Whale Yoga for Kids" with Jodi Komitor from Next Generation Yoga. The original inspiration for the project was videos we took of whales in the channel between Maui and Lanai during January when they are very active there. I wrote a song called "The Wild and Living Sea" inspired by the whales. Jodi saw the video and heard the song and was inspired to create a yoga routine for kids that mimicked some of the movements of the whales and the ocean. Here's the original song that inspired the video and several of the pieces:
Pieces Inspired by the Song
There are three pieces in standard tuning which were total improvisations created on the spot. These are the ones most obviously based on the theme from The Wild and Living Sea:
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Fair Winds - a simple contemplation on the Wild and Living Sea theme.
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Island Sunset - inspired by the slow spectacular sunsets on the west coast of Maui
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Train Along the Shore - a wild ride into a lot of arpeggios that suggest a rollicking movement
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The other two pieces created for this project and discussed elsewhere on this page are Mysterious Deep and Earth Waves - again in standard tuning.
Earth Waves
This piece was recorded on a Timberline guitar set up with the Nashville high-strung guitar tuning where the lower three strings are replaced with strings tuned an octave higher.
After recording the improvisation, I lightly edited it and added a track using a synth orchestra sound that follows the progression of the guitar part. This was also released to a music library under the title "Alaska to Hawaii" since it seemed to me to follow the feeling of that migration made by the humpback whales every year. The track appears on several compilation albums online under both names. Here's an example from Spotify:
The Good Food Factory
The final track on the album "Surf Factory" was created for the TV show "The Good Food Factory" which is a healthy cooking show for kids hosted by show creator Amanda Mascia. My wife Lencsi and I were co-producers on the show with Amanda and I wrote songs for 15 of the shows.
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The "Surf Snacks" episode of the show featured a surf montage shot in Oceanside, California. I created this track as the surf music for the segment. It was great fun creating this piece - I started with a drum track generated in Logic and then layered rhythm guitar, bass and lead. The episode was submitted to NATAS for an Emmy award and won the Emmy for outstanding achievement in children's programming in 2012.
Here is the video of the surf montage with the Surf Factory track:
Summer Suite
Three of the pieces were written pretty much at the same time over a period of about a week in the summer of 2019. All three use an Open C tuning where the guitar is tuned (low to high) C G C G C E.
I conceived these pieces in the form of a three part suite with an allegro first movement "Summer Solstice" heralding the start of summer at the solstice - the day I created the piece. The slower more pensive second movement "Tender Dreams" feels to me like a song for a rainy summer's day. The final movement "Happy Hoedown" feels like a celebration dance to round out the summer theme.
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Here are videos of the recording sessions for Summer Solstice and Happy Hoedown:
Tender Dreams & the IAMA
The piece "Tender Dreams" was chosen as a Finalist in the instrumental category for the 16th Annual International Acoustic Music Awards. This is a video of me playing the actual recording used on the album:
Hawaiian Slack-Key Guitar Pieces
Two of the pieces - "Waterfall Sunrise" and "Puamana" use an open tuning sometimes called "C Wahine" by aficionados of the Hawaiian Slack-Key style. The tuning from low to high is C G D G B D
and the effect is an open G chord on the top five strings with the subdominant C as the low 6th string.
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I used a Guild Jumbo Maple 12-string guitar for Puamana which gives it a very full resonant sound and reminds of some of my favorite slack-key pieces played on the 12 string. Waterfall Sunrise is played on a Ramirez classical guitar and is quite an intense arpeggio study. Here are videos of my performance of these for the album:
Ancestral Voyager
Ancestral Voyager is a piece created during the pandemic in the DADGAD tuning - a fairly popular tuning, especially for Celtic music. The piece is in 6/8 meter which gives it the feeling of a jig. The technique freely ranges between finger picking and strumming and the music employs Hemiola - a musical figure in which, typically, two groups of three beats are replaced by three groups of two beats, giving the effect of a shift between triple and duple meter. Here is a video of the recording - engineered by my friend Dave Michaels, another great San Diego guitarist and recording engineer:
Cloud Sailing
Cloud Sailing is another piece created during the pandemic in a fairly uncommon tuning that I tried as a creative challenge to see what I could make of it. The tuning from low to high is D A D F B E - so both the sixth string and the third string are tuned down a whole step. The resulting minor 6/9 chord makes for a very haunting sound for the open strings.
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The piece has an otherworldly floating feeling that reminds me of floating through the clouds in a hot air balloon, hence the title. Here is a video of the recording session for the piece, engineered by Dave Michaels: