October 2010 Blog Posts (14)

So I have a ridiculous number of pieces unfinished. I'm looking forward to being able to sit down and work on them. Football season is all-consuming. Even on evenings when I don't have a practice to run, I'm so exhausted that it's difficult to focus, so ideas don't flow and my patience runs short. This morning I've been looking through the backlog while waiting for students to arrive. I've come to the conclusion that I really need to put myself out there as soon as possible.





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Ok,

So eventually I need to start arranging some more pieces. However, I need some opinions on what you all think is something very interesting, unique, and challenging to arrange. Any suggestions?

Adam

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I've been asked to write for a piano quintet [piano + string quartet]. Nothing fancy, but the players will be first-rate. So I cannot hand them manuscript.

Been offered anything I need. I also need to be reasonable. I set my budget at $2,000. I'd like not to ask for more than that.

I will get Finale 2011 at $350 (academic/institutional)

I need a new, stronger PC. Any RAM ideas? I know, "as fast as possible." I will go for Windows.

Those are…

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THE FORUM

A few months ago I joined this forum with the idea of checking around a bit about this whole 'composing' scene.



I basically come from a whole different scene of music experience (rock, metal) but I've always been interested in the whole film and games music industry.



I've been using some symphonic software and keyboards anyway along my 'heavy metal' period (that is still active though, but less than before), but I was… Continue

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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Halloween is around the corner and something spooky happened to me on October 13 th. I was online surfing the web and when I landed on synthtopia website phantom music played on my computer. I couldn't find the source of the music. There were no open applications. No, I didn't press the play button and forget. I looked for the source of the music, but I couldn't find it. Does anyone out there have a similar experience? Continue

Yesterday I listened again to Jethro Tull's 2nd album- 'Stand Up'.
What I find interesting, is the way some of the tunes SWING. I love the rhythm of a song like 'Nothing's Easy' (anyone remember?) I really enjoy rock tunes that lean in the direction of swing. Another tune with great rhythm is Led Zeppelin's 'Good Times, Bad Times'. I'd like to compose music that explores interesting rhythms like these. It's an area that needs to be explored further.

At this time, one term appears more and more strongly in my consciousness - the term "museum music". From a contemporary point of view, it can be defined as the music of those composers who have decided to run from the current time ,or even the recent past time, and whose musical compositions are, thus, fit to hand in directly to a “music museum”. It is as if these composers were trying to reconstruct a type of music that is of…

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As many people here know, film scores are subject to the whims of fashion. One thing I've noticed of late has been a scary comeback of an instrument that had long been absent from 'big' film scores since the late 80s.

I speak of ... the electric guitar!

Yes, once common in every score from Top Gun to The Rock this byword for 'instant cool' in movie scores has long been away.

I first noticed the return with (another Bruckheimer…

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A few years ago, I was faced with this question. I wanted to record my guitar AND I wanted to hear it with a reverb effect as I played along with pre-recorded tracks. I did not want to record the reverb. I wanted the guitar to be recorded 'dry' without reverb. How to do this with my small studio setup?



The key is in how you route your outputs.

signal flow:

guitar > guitar amplifier > microphone > mic preamp >… Continue

Alright here goes. Recently the question of "fractal" music arose on the forum here, and it incited me to revisit the topic.

Applying fractal concepts to music could be interpreted many ways, and with no precedent by which to proceed (my favorite conditions by which to work incidentally), I decided to work out this first piece, Ode to Earth, in accordance with my own musical interpretation of fractal structure.

Keep in mind, the "fractalization" was only carried…

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I've had two (very different) theory teachers so far in my career as a musician and neither was willing or able to explain the relationship between the number 9 and interval inversion. I was taught it as a "quick check" or rule before I just knew what the inversions were. Whatever interval you have is subtracted from 9 and the yield is… Continue

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