Story of Qayaas by Khurram Waqar

I really wanted to share the story behind Qayaas with all of you on my blog but that is still a few more days away. Since I just can’t wait to get it out of my system, so here it goes …. This all started when OP, a dear friend was shooting a show for ARY Muzik in my studio which involved all the upcoming bands in Islamabad. That is where I heard Umair with his band Silversmoke. Both OP and myself were impressed and I knew right there that if I am going to ever work with a vocalist besides Qasim (kNuMB), it will probably be Umair. kNuMB was not going anywhere due to various logistic issues , the main being Qasim living in Lahore. By the way, kNuMB album is also written and a few tracks recorded but it is on an indefinite hold for now.

So as the story goes, I was really itching for getting something off the ground. In this process, I wrote a whole new instrumental album, recorded one of the tracks “Bundle of Joy” and even made a video of it which I totally refused to release after seeing the final edit (More on that later). While all this was going on, I contaced Umair and he was very entusiastic about the idea of us working together. I frankly told him that this in no way means that he should leave Silversmoke. They are currently working on their debut album and it should also be finished in the next few months.

So, it all started out as us doing an acoustic album. I gave Umair some stuff to work on and he came back with a really sweet melody on one of the ideas which became our song “Pal”. My wife, Mariam, also helped with the melody in the verses and it turned out as a really cool ballad. The second song that we started work on was “Tanha”. This was something that I had lying in limbo for quite a while. It was in an alternate tuning and was more of an instrumental with a grungy feel to it. Sherry had made a basic melody for the verses a couple of years ago while we were just jamming and that was about it. So now we seriously concentrated on it and made a whole song totally on the acoustic guitars. The initial tempo of the song was slow around the 80 bpm and had a very bluesy grungy feel to it. In due time, we plan to release an acoustic version of Tanha as well, the way it was originally conceived. Once we started jamming on it with drums, it was mutually decided to up the tempo. Once the drums were tracked by Fifu and a basic layer of vocals laid by Umair, I sat down and came up with the distorted chorus and bridge riffs and the clean arpeggios on top of the basic acoustic rhythms. We at that point had no idea that Tanha would turn out to be a pretty heavy rock number. In a nutshell, this is how Qayaas was born and we wrote songs pretty quickly. We started working on songs in June, 2008 and the album is fully recorded as of now.

I guess thats where I should stop and leave something for the future as well …. 🙂 More on Tanha solo and outro later together with the interesting tidbits while we tracked the final vocals and the bass( I changed the bass atleast 4 times before I finally got the right riffs going). Hopefully next time, the continuation of this will be on our blog.

Cheers,
kW