Music Composers Unite!

October 2008 Blog Posts (8)

YouTube annotations - an update

Annotations on YouTube videos have been in beta for a while, but it looks like they are official now and one new feature is that when the video is embedded outside of YouTube, the annotations now play properly. This is a great tool for musical analysis, and particularly for students to demonstrate their own evaluation of their work, directly linked to the track, Pure text is so dissatisfying for musical commentary - but so sweet when connected directly to the music! Soundcloud allows you to do… Continue

Added by pete whitfield on October 31, 2008 at 3:30am — No Comments

Soundcloud

Soundcloud.com is a cool new web service for anyone dealing with audio. You really have to sign up and play around with it to get a feel for what it is! As well as being able to upload large audio files and share them, you can attach comments to the wave form. Hopefully it will embed here, if not, try looking at it on the soundcloud website.

Roll your cursor over the little avatars under the… Continue

Added by pete whitfield on October 30, 2008 at 4:30am — 3 Comments

Readymix

Well, the latest hot off the presses is that the album is almost ready for mixing! I plan to make a start on Saturday, though a lot of the work is done. But as I'm inexperienced I want to get help from an audio engineer mate of mine.

About half the tracks are now much better than they were, and even the general standard of the others has definitely improved over the 15 months I've been working on it, as I've learned the black art of making waveforms dance (still a sorcerer's… Continue

Added by Mike Torr on October 29, 2008 at 7:59pm — No Comments

a modes overview

I've dabbled with interactive web tools for music language - mostly aural but a bit of theory too. Here, I've tried to present a reference for various modes, bringing together the names, spelling and sound. If you click the mode names randomly you get either a complete mess or a contemporary… Continue

Added by pete whitfield on October 29, 2008 at 1:09pm — 1 Comment

note flight

No, it's not something by Rimsky Korsakov but a new web service for creating online music notation.

One cool tool for music educators. Currently in… Continue

Added by pete whitfield on October 27, 2008 at 7:31am — No Comments

The Secret Sauce

In light of my more popular blog posts I decided to really give the game away here and post up some of my favoured mix/production techniques.

A review of my commercially available music (http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=57994&src=compforum) brought to light that the freely available music on my website is not of the quality of my current output. To this end I've decided to… Continue

Added by James Semple on October 21, 2008 at 11:00am — 10 Comments

Off to NY

Ok, I will (at last) be heading to Steven Scott Smalley's world-famous orchestrator's workshop in Manhattan this coming Saturday.

I have very high hopes for this course. Just yesterday I bought the new "Lego Batman" game for the Wii and the music is an arrangement of the Danny Elfman theme. It struck me that although the theme is pretty cool, the real strength of that music is in the amazing orchestration and how the theme is developed and used by the various instruments. As Mr… Continue

Added by James Semple on October 13, 2008 at 5:18am — 4 Comments

CUP O'JOY

Okay, so I get a message from John Schlitt's booking agent. Her name is Sue Demister, and she is with Nova productions out of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She has listened to some of my music and likes it a lot. We talked on the phone for a little bit, and she directed me to the Cup o'Joy coffee house in Green Bay. I contacted them and will be singing there this Friday night for one of their open mic nights. Way cool!

Then I get an…

Continue

Added by Steven S. Billings on October 1, 2008 at 5:34pm — No Comments