April 2009
Wednesday, April 1
Different things going on here at Le Studio.
Scored a TV spot for the upcoming Nashville Film Festival. The visuals have clips from all two-hundred fifty-six films, three of which last two to three seconds, the rest time-compressed down to a seizure-inducing pace. First priority was tempo. I sort of hummed along while watching the edit clip, and realized that their hit points felt consistent with an actual bpm value. I set up a click track, fudged a bit with the setting, and 140 bpm did the trick. Acoustic bass and all percussion via Structure, except the kick from Xpand. I tried the piano part with a couple of Structure patches, but went back to the trusty Motif, as I often do. Synth arpeggiator and lounge organ from the Virus. To invoke a multiple movie clip vibe, I imported a variety of sound effect snippets - ambiences, male narrator - and chopped them up into sixteenth-note bits. I then assembled them into rhythmic patterns that repeat a couple of times. It's mostly a burst of hyper-staccato noise, but it conveys the point. See and hear a Quicktime clip of it here.
Completed and re-mixed a few of my pieces for a mix sample reel. Most have been posted before - here's a newer one. It was started some time last summer, after a couple of late-night hours in the gardens.
Writing some - in my case, this means two things: putting music to someone else's lyrics, and my own electro stuff. Two actual songs resulted from the lyric/music adventure. The process for this one was sort of interesting. Writer Tina Caveness had done a demo of it with someone else that was quite a bit slower, just a guitar riff and simple rhythm pattern. I mimicked the riff with hammer(ed) dulcimer, and augmented that with a dulcimer patch in Structure (surprise - didn't know it was in there). It had been several years since I played the hammer dulcimer, and it took a couple of hours in loop-record to get it right. All percussion was done with Structure with a percussion loop from Xpand; piano and synths were Motif and Virus. Vocal processing via the H8000.
Recorded a set of voice prompts for a healthcare company's on-hold message bank. They wanted 8-bit, 8k µ-law files. After some searching, I happened upon some inexpensive Mac software that would make the conversions, which was a great relief as I was initially faced with taking the 16bit wav files to the wife unit's studio, purchasing/downloading Goldwave (PC-only) and using that...a hassle at best, a potential nightmare at worst. The only issue was that I had to change the resulting file extensions from ".au" (a Sun Systems file) to ".wav" as the company's telephone system is particular about it.
I've placed two ads looking for a musically like-minded female writer-singer person to compose with, and have received one reply that may or may not pan out. To anyone who isn't familiar with my stuff, this is a very specific request. I find myself saying things like "I know you're out there...where are you..." But, it is Nashville, so.........
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