The Shepherd in the Temple, Jon Pickard
This fretless Harp Guitar is the only one of its kind in the world. I wanted something unique when I conceived what it was to become, and when it was finally finished it really fulfilled my wildest dreams. This was thanks to 2 fantastic luthiers - Sean Woolley, who built it and then converted it to fretless at my request, and Alan Miller who added the 10 steel super trebles and the lowest sub-bass and sharping levers to my specifications. https://www.seanwoolleyguitars.com/ http://alanmillerguitars.co.uk/ The Shepherd in the Temple is musically a very simple tune. It is primal and repetitive, and whilst writing it it gave me, for reasons known only to the gods, visions of ancient temple pillars, like a long forgotten memory. During this time I happened to read 2 stories by Kalil Gibran - Dust of The Ages, and The Eternal Fire. These 2 fictional stories are really just 1 story, told across different incarnations and separated by thousands of years. They tell of a glittering ancient temple and city, a love tragically lost, and an ancient goddess beautiful but cruel. Then the passing of millennia, the unstoppable sands of time and the beautiful rediscovering by an innocent shepherd, and a remembering. I fell deeply into this story and read it several times over a few weeks. This tune developed at the same time and the two became symbiotic. Living in the UK made it a little tricky to find a ruined desert city to film in, so I chose a more local style of ancient temple from about the same time period. This was the stunningly powerful site known today as Arbor Low, in Derbyshire. On the day when I arrived to film I had the pleasure to meet and share the site with a new friend Paul, who was conducting his own significant moments there, and he agreed to let me include him later in the video. His presence added a subtle but wonderful quality to the feeling of this video, and he may have actually become, for the purpose of this video, the actual ’Shepherd in the Temple'. Thanks Paul! The amazing drone footage is also of Arbor Low and belongs to a YouTuber called Stubwood. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgq8JWaH2WM&t=50s I have been trying to find a way to contact him to ask his permission to use the footage, but so far haven’t been able to reach him. So, Stubwood, if you read this - I really hope you don’t mind me using your wonderful footage in this way - I have credited you in the scrolling credits at the end. If you are in any way not happy about this please let me know and I will be able to remove this video and edit your footage out. Finally, Big thanks also to Ales Rajar for allowing me to use his beautiful desert graphics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suUAwey3zZc&t=19s) which he expertly created for a version of the Unreal video game, but so perfectly match the vision of this tune. I hope you enjoy this video and that it may inspire you in some way. Please let me know what you think of it.
This fretless Harp Guitar is the only one of its kind in the world. I wanted something unique when I conceived what it was to become, and when it was finally finished it really fulfilled my wildest dreams. This was thanks to 2 fantastic luthiers - Sean Woolley, who built it and then converted it to fretless at my request, and Alan Miller who added the 10 steel super trebles and the lowest sub-bass and sharping levers to my specifications. https://www.seanwoolleyguitars.com/ http://alanmillerguitars.co.uk/ The Shepherd in the Temple is musically a very simple tune. It is primal and repetitive, and whilst writing it it gave me, for reasons known only to the gods, visions of ancient temple pillars, like a long forgotten memory. During this time I happened to read 2 stories by Kalil Gibran - Dust of The Ages, and The Eternal Fire. These 2 fictional stories are really just 1 story, told across different incarnations and separated by thousands of years. They tell of a glittering ancient temple and city, a love tragically lost, and an ancient goddess beautiful but cruel. Then the passing of millennia, the unstoppable sands of time and the beautiful rediscovering by an innocent shepherd, and a remembering. I fell deeply into this story and read it several times over a few weeks. This tune developed at the same time and the two became symbiotic. Living in the UK made it a little tricky to find a ruined desert city to film in, so I chose a more local style of ancient temple from about the same time period. This was the stunningly powerful site known today as Arbor Low, in Derbyshire. On the day when I arrived to film I had the pleasure to meet and share the site with a new friend Paul, who was conducting his own significant moments there, and he agreed to let me include him later in the video. His presence added a subtle but wonderful quality to the feeling of this video, and he may have actually become, for the purpose of this video, the actual ’Shepherd in the Temple'. Thanks Paul! The amazing drone footage is also of Arbor Low and belongs to a YouTuber called Stubwood. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgq8JWaH2WM&t=50s I have been trying to find a way to contact him to ask his permission to use the footage, but so far haven’t been able to reach him. So, Stubwood, if you read this - I really hope you don’t mind me using your wonderful footage in this way - I have credited you in the scrolling credits at the end. If you are in any way not happy about this please let me know and I will be able to remove this video and edit your footage out. Finally, Big thanks also to Ales Rajar for allowing me to use his beautiful desert graphics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suUAwey3zZc&t=19s) which he expertly created for a version of the Unreal video game, but so perfectly match the vision of this tune. I hope you enjoy this video and that it may inspire you in some way. Please let me know what you think of it.