There are a number of threads going here that I would like to respond to, so I feel a little bad starting up a new one of my own; but I've had very limited free time lately because I've started grad school (it is way more time consuming than I would expect something that is "flexible for working adults" to be). What time I've had has been spent either trying to keep from getting too rusty on the guitar or putting together a master VO template to better my workflow. Now I need some objective ears, because frankly I think I'm just tinkering too much, not getting anywhere with it, and neglecting making actual music.
Below is a link to a little scratch track I started with the template that I think is beginning to take shape. there are some parts that are just sort of "blocking" and other parts that are a little more coherent. I didn't want to use such an incomplete, sloppy track or one with so much "exoticism" in the orchestration, but this is all there is right now. I'm primarily looking for thoughts on relative volume, placement / spacing, and general "technical" stuff, but all comments are welcome, of course. Remember, though, this is just a sketch at this point.
There are also some parts that I think sound like bad rip-offs of Jesse Hopkins' soundtrack to Mount and Blade, so I'll have to do something about that...
Last night I took my daughter to a local community orchestra concert. The theme was 20th Century Russians. They played Festive Overture by Shostakovich, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Rachmaninoff, the March from The Love for Three Oranges by Prokofiev, and then Shostakovich's entire 5th Symphony.
The strings, woodwinds, and brass sections were seated in a fairly typical fashion, but I was surprised to see the percussionists seated way over to the right, directly behind the cellists and bassists, instead of in the back like I've seen in a lot of other concerts. Another surprise was that for the Rachmaninoff piece, they wheeled an enormous concert grand piano out to front and center, obscuring the conductor with its open lid. That made more sense to me as we listened to the piece, which is very piano-centric.
While listening, I tried to make observations about the sounds that I could hopefully apply to my virtual orchestrations. One thing I noticed is that being seated about two thirds of the way back in the audience, the left/right stereo effect of the players' seating was not nearly so exaggerated as sometimes heard in virtual orchestration. Sure, I could close my eyes, and the first violins section sounded like it was kind of over on the left, and the basses sounded kind of over on the right, but the whole sound was much more centered than my own virtual orchestrations.
Sometimes I would find that one of the sections was doing something interesting that I wanted to hear, only to be eclipsed by a louder instrument. This happened a few times during the Rachmaninoff piece; I wanted to hear what the woodwinds were doing, and the pianist would passionately dive into some solo that made it hard to hear the woodwind players.
Another thing I noticed is that some of the articulations have way more nuance than I generally think about when doing compositions. For example, I often think of tremolo as being a single articulation that can be used on each string section, but it seemed like the tremolo parts were played in a lot of different ways. Sometimes the bows would barely move back and forth, resulting in a sort of shimmering sound. Other times there would be longer bow strokes with a much more turbulent result.
One of the pizzicato parts was much more quiet than I thought it would be, and I don’t think that it was just because the notation dictated that it should be played softly. The violinists and violists were rapidly plucking the strings to play 16th notes, and I wondered if the soft sound was a result of the fact that they just didn’t have enough time during each note to pluck the strings very hard.
If anything, I wanted to hear more Prokofiev! That part was only two minutes! It was so short that the audience hesitated to applaud, wondering if it would continue after a short pause. They played about an hour of Shotakovich, but only two minutes of Prokofiev.
Since other people are sharing their creative writing, I'm going to do it too... I wonder if this forum should be renamed "Creative People who like to make Music and Virtual Instruments and Audio Plugins and Food and Stories Central"
My problem is that I have characters haunt my mind. They won't go away until I start writing about them, at which point the writer's block sets in and they leave me alone for a while. So you might consider my motive for writing to be getting these characters out of my head.
I have three to share, the first two have stayed fairly short, but the last one keeps growing.
I consider myself to be what some authors call a "gardener", meaning that I don't really have a plot thought out, I just have a scene with some characters in my head and start writing to see where it goes. This is probably why I always get to a point that I don't know something interesting to write next.
My adventure began as many do in the modern world with a text message, "A guy has boxes of old books like the Hardy Boys. You want them? 100 bucks."
One world sealed my fate, "Yeah."
"I'll come get you," was the reply. Fifteen minutes later, my buddy who we will call T drove up in his rumbling old pickup truck. As we headed north on the highway, he filled me in. He and friend had looked up an old army buddy who was in town to deal with the estate of his, the old army buddy's, great uncle. The estate auction had finished, but nobody wanted all these piles of boxes that were filled with what looked like books typewritten. T who knew how much I liked old books asked about them. He was told that generations ago, the family had owned a publishing company. For some reason the family had hung onto these particular manuscripts which were old kids series kind of like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, but even older. With that he texted me and you are caught up.
When we got to the rambling old house, the army buddy met us and showed us the boxes that he had stacked in the front room.
"There they are if you want to look at them," he said almost in passing. I handed him the hundred dollar bill and that seemed to interest him.
"You'll take them sight unseen?" he asked.
"Yeah, I'll get that much in entertainment value out of them anyway. Maybe I'll put some of them up on Gutenberg as long as they are public domain," I said.
"Do whatever you want with them. I'm just happy with the hundred, me and the guys will eat good tonight." I looked at him a bit funny and he explained, "The money from the auction and the house and stuff wont come through for a while. This is pizza and gas to get us back home." His buddies came out to help us load the truck and tie an old tarp on the truck to keep anything from blowing away.
"Speaking of food," I said to T as we pulled away, "Want a bite, its on me." As we pulled into a Chick-fil-A, I grabbed a couple of the manuscripts and papers from under the tarp to see what we had. Over some nicely made chicken sandwiches we looked over some of the oddest books I had ever seen. I knew that some of the series books went back to the 1890s and were a bit old fashioned with stories about the Wireless Boys and the Motorcycle Boys, but these were quirky even by those standards. The Semaphore Boys on Earthquake Island was one I had happened to pull along with The Electric Boys and the Electric Quadcycle. There was also some paperwork which seemed to be a list of at least some of the series and some sales numbers. The Dirigible Boys and The Electric Boys seemed to be selling pretty well though in the 1920s, though the Bicycle Boys and the Semaphore Boys didn't seem to be doing so well. T had grabbed the Electric Boys so I flipped open the Semaphore Boys. I seemed to have joined them mid earthquake.
Another shock rocked the small island. The ground swayed and swelled under the boys' feet. Farther up the mountain a mighty oak cracked and fell startling the boys and a family of deer who cam hurtling past them forgetting for the moment their natural fear of mankind.
"We don't have much longer," cried Jupiter. The sweat was beading on his normally unperturbed brow.
"I'm waving these flags as fast as I can," yelled Mars from the top of the tree.
"You run up to the top of that hill that overlooked the north side of the island," Jupiter told Mercury urgently. His brother was off like a shot. The smallest of the three scaled the hill with the ease of a mountain goat and was soon signalling swiftly but efficiently. Jupiter watched his two brothers using their only pairs of signalling flag and wondered if there might someday be a better way off attracting the attention of boats at sea. He suddenly remembered some fine books he had once read about the group of boys who had used smoke signals in the wilds of America. He didn't want to start the whole of the heavily forested island on fire, but maybe it was an idea and anyway it was better than standing there and doing nothing.
Jupiter clambered up the side of the mountain with some difficulty as he was designed more for thinking that manual labor. He found a smooth area of rock with some deadwood situated conveniently nearby. He hauled and hacked at the wood until he had managed to build something that looked like a small teepee of wood. Using his fire starter he scraped sparks off into dry wood until several places managed to catch fire. As I was getting caught up in the boys predicament and wonder if Jupiter was going to attract a ship of roast everyone on the island alive, T caught be attention with a hearty chuckle.
"These Electric Boys have some pretty fair luck," he told me.
"Why what happened to them?" I asked.
"Well two gangs are after them. The boys were eating in a diner with the police chief. The first gang loosened the bolts on the Quadcycle so that the tires would fly off when it got going fast which I think was about twenty miles an hour. Then hid their own car beside the road to follow the boys after the quadcycle crashed. The second gang stole the quadcycle though and of course they crashed. The first gang saw the crash and started attacking the people in the car who they thought were the electric boys, but were really the second gang."
"That was lucky."
"And then Jupiter got the police chief to call on his electric radio and all the policemen came and arrested both gangs which wasn't very hard to do because they had mostly knocked each other out," T concluded.
"Did you say Jupiter?" I asked.
"Yeah he is the big brother, Mars and Mercury are his brothers. Weird names for a kids book."
"Even stranger, they are the same kids who are in my book. At least they have the same names."
As the final season of Game of Thrones is getting closer, I thought of creating a more emotional / chill version of the main theme, hope you guys enjoy it!
Did I already inflict this on this message board? A short story stolen err derived from a public domain old time radio show and a work in progress bonkers encyclopedia that is all the way up to words starting with ab...
Well the desktop no longer recognizes the boot drive. I think this is a motherboard problem. Any thoughts on motherboards? Intel v AMD. I have some kind of I7 quad core if memory serves. Should I get a newer AMD CPU as my tech buddy suggests? How long can you live on roman noodles and chicken nuggets? Will my Sims 4 characters miss me?
I'm off to fight depression by watching Big Bang Theory and reading PG Wodehouse with some possible classic Doctor Who thrown in. What does this say about me and should I seek professional therapy?
So earlier last month I started up a blog reviewing film, tv, game, and anime scores. It's called Sincere Overtones.
Anyway. The more music I listen to, the more I realize my headphones' inadequacy for the task of reproducing music clearly, evenly, without muffling or incomplete frequencies; especially when it's a nice, big orchestral soundtrack with density of instrumental lines.
My ideal pair of headphones reproduces sound clearly, "as it is," without excess of bass nor excess of treble, without muffling or restriction or incompleteness of frequencies. Oh, and it's also sub-$200, if at all possible. And, ideally, it would be a pair of headphones that I could use while composing, too.
So - what do you all use for listening? What do you recommend?
This past summer I became aware of a computer game called Caves of Qud that looked mighty interesting. I was holding off on buying it until it was done (one of those "early access" deals), and until I had some actual time to spend on playing games. Well, one night I was stranded at my parents' because of a blizzard and the beer selection was pretty inviting...
So now I have Caves of Qud, and boy am I'm I enjoying it. I don't know how many of you enjoy or have even played a "rogue-like" computer game, but this one is really cool and I recommend it to anyone who likes something that thinks outside the box and has some identity of its own. It's imaginative, immersive, and very atmospheric. Most rogue-likes, fun though they may be (my brother is a big proponent of Net-Hack, and I've spent a decent amount of time with Stone Soup Crawl and TOME), tend to just kind of kill you before you even get a chance to see what the world has to offer. Qud seems to reward experimentation a bit more (for instance, I'm some sort of plant-man and I've contracted several semi-useful fungal infections that do things like attack my enemies with spores and light up at night to help me see). Yes, I turned off permadeath because I'm a loser and I have other things to do besides get angry at video games; but even so if you start at the recommended place for beginners it's not quite as brutal as the descriptions made it out to be. Then again, like most rogue-likes, it's mostly procedurally generated... But still.
Another nice thing is that the game explains itself pretty well. If you have some experience with rogue-likes you will probably pick it up a little faster. But I by no means have much more than a semi-casual level of knowledge and I've been able to pick it up quickly.
In any case, I appreciate the developers' choice to create a world they wanted to create instead of one based entirely on tropes. Tropes are totally cool but that's a different tack entirely...
The music is pretty nice, too. Not symphonic but more a mix of ethnic and synth. I've only heard a few tracks so far, but it's just as idiosyncratic as the rest of the game.
