Financing Available Through 
Today’s featured track is “Magic Fireflies” from Brazilian guitarist and composer Harã Lemes’ latest release The New Land. The song is a mesmerizing and melodic combination of guitar, vocals, and percussion that deftly weaves in the unique firefly sounds Lemes created using TimeLine.
The New Land is a concept album that continues the tale Lemes began on his 2017 release Technological Singularity and takes place at a point in the future where artificial intelligence (AI) has surpassed that of human intelligence and as Lemes puts it, “the machines take over.” The title of the new record takes its name from the last track on Singularity.
“The album represents a day on the new land,” Lemes explained. “It starts with the ‘Sunrise’ song and ends with ‘Cosmic Lullaby’ song.” He continued, “‘Magic Fireflies’ is on the final part of [the] album and was composed to have a nighttime atmosphere. I just needed to look for a sound that would represent … the fireflies luminance.”
While The New Land is the next chapter in the Singularity story, the primary inspiration for the music came when Lemes learned he was going to be a father. News of the baby-to-be moved him to shift the musical narrative from the broader perspective of humankind searching for a new celestial home to that of one little astronaut discovering and exploring a new planet.
According to Lemes, the fireflies theme came from his desire to add otherworldly elements to the music. “Since I was a child, I always thought that fireflies are one of the most magical things we could have contact [with] in our real world,” he shared. ‘The fireflies are in the sky, waiting for you’ [lyric] is to my baby, but I decided to [then] create a unique track for fireflies.”
Listen to “Magic Fireflies” below and read on to learn about the TimeLine settings used for the song.
“Delays are magic. It is able to carry the music to another level creating unique textures,” Lemes explained. “Besides delay, I really like filters. I use it a lot on several occasions because I think the filter can make the sound warm or cold, live or opaque, and this also helps to create beautiful textures.” He continued: “In this preset, I decided to join the two effects, and as the Timeline is a complete delay machine, it enabled me to do it. I chose to make the delays repeating in filters because, in my mind, fireflies would have these types of sounds, if they were sonorous. After that, I recorded this riff with TimeLine in stereo mode to be wider. What made this sound interesting [was] waiting for the time to listen to the delay as a question and answer game.”
“For the solos, I used a dTape effect, with a more subtle configuration, just to wet the electric guitar a bit.”
Using the Strymon Librarian or our new Nixie preset editor? Download Magic Fireflies Riff and Download Magic Fireflies Solo 1, and load them into your TimeLine.
Post a video or clip online playing this preset, and please share by tagging #strymonpreset. Are there other preset/favorite types that you’d like to see in upcoming blog posts? Let us know what you think. Thanks!
Subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to hear about new Strymon products, artist features, and behind the scenes content!
As a teenager learning guitar, David Helpling was drawn to experimentation with various effects and signal processors to create illusions with sound. Now an award-winning
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Ethan Tufts [ Hello Road ] (@mrethantufts) You’ll never believe what I found sitting on the side
One of my favorite effects to use is a delay with a lot of repeats and a slowly sweeping filter on those repeats. I think it creates a
