Yay composing!

OK ... I HAVE to tackle this subject because I've found that it so often comes up in musical conversation and is massively misunderstood. The usage and avoidance of parallel fifths and parallel octaves. 



My idea is to try and get the basic understanding across of when we do and don't use these devices and most of the reasoning why. As it can be a bit of a touchy subject I had the article double-checked by two musicologists: Maria Antal and Yaiza Varona.…

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Hey everyone, sorry it's been so long since my last blog post. I finally found a new subject that I thought would be perfect. Also apologies for the lack of formatting. I'm writing this from my phone on a train in Rome. When I get to a laptop I'll clean it up.



In this article we're going to examine a device used by John Williams in many of his love themes. In the past I've examined how he uses the harmonic minor to great effect. Here we are going to look at his usage of the melodic… Continue

Hi all,

 

I know I know it's been ages but I thought I'd quickly throw out a blog on how I set up my reverb for orchestral mixes. I used to use a really, really complicated method but of late I've settled on something fairly simple and straightforward that I feel works and gives a realistic result and uses fairly modest CPU.

 

I'm literally only going to use QL Spaces for this and we're going to set up some sends.

 

So as a starting point we might as…

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Prologue

Yes! It's the return of my blog posts and their awful puns for titles... I can never resist them! Recently I'd been investigating some orchestral scores from favourite composers and realised that some of my favourite sounds and devices were achieved by using the harmonic minor scale as a resource but in a non-traditional way. Eventually I felt I had enough material to dedicate an entire blog post to it. Hopefully this will be…

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This is just an incredibly brief blog post to say thank you so much to everyone who came along to the Composium this last weekend.

I was especially pleased to see all the new people who turned up this time and fit right into the group. Lots of excellent discussions on a variety of subjects (occasionally music even came up) ... lots of laughs, lots of drinks and some excellent, excellent food at a beautiful restaurant.

My feeling is that the next one will be in…

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