I started a record label.
I’m launching a micro-indie record label and I could really use your help!
composing/songwriting
#7daysofVGM take two: a different approach
For my second #7DaysOfVGM Composition Challenge, I treated all seven little pieces of music I wrote as if they were all part of the same video game score.
#7daysofVGM: a thrilling compositional sprint
The #7daysofVGM Composition Challenge is a semi-regular week-long event coordinated by the Video Game Music Academy. It’s basically a compositional sprint—or rather, seven of them in a row. There is...
composing/songwriting / entertaining / inspiring / media / music / music performance / music recording / scoring / sound / sound design / video
Diego Stocco’s Custom Built Orchestra.
Now here’s a man living out his love of sounds. A great introduction to Diego Stocco via his Custom Built Orchestra:
composing/songwriting / entertaining / inspiring / media / music / music performance / technology / video
Virtual choir: performance, and technology, and… wow.
Composer Eric Whitacre, known for stirring choral compositions, has for several years been doing an experiment he calls “Virtual Choir”. He makes a guide track available for one of his pieces—something to sing along to—and asks the public to record themselves singing their part on camera and send it to him. In this particular rendition, “Virtual Choir 3,” you are apparently hearing 3746 voices from 73 countries performing together. Whoa.
Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir 3, ‘Water Night’
Musical instruments made of ice.
In Norway (them’s my peeps!) there’s an annual music festival where all the instruments are made mostly or entirely of ice. Look for the cello. That’s right, a cello.
For more info: icemusicfestival.no. Or watch this news piece.
Here in the U.S., there was a University of Michigan ice percussion concert in 2011.
Cool. Pun intended.
Everything is a drum: frozen lake edition.
So apparently a woman slipped on the ice and it made a cool sound, which gave her percussionist husband the idea to write and perform a piece for this frozen lake in Siberia. The ensemble is Ethnobeat. The lake is Lake Baikal, which at one mile deep and 25 million years of age is the oldest and deepest freshwater lake in the world, and also the largest by volume. (Another interesting tidbit: there’s an annual marathon held entirely on the frozen lake.)
I noticed some comments on the video about how it sounds fake. Giving it a really close listen, in my opinion it’s the real deal, although they do seem to have “cheated” by layering on overdubs. In other words, it’s not all performed at once, live, on camera. But it does appear to be real, and that’s pretty awesome. You can read more about the group and their experience on the lake in the Siberian Times.
Morten Lauridsen shows you how to write a song.
In a great little seven-and-a-half-minute video courtesy of classicalchops.org, Morten Lauridsen takes us through the compositional process behind one of the most performed choral pieces of our time, Dirait-On. (French, pronounced something like “dee-ray-tawn”.)
A newly discovered 150-year-old composition.
If you appreciate a good Mendelssohn melody like I do, you might be interested to hear that a piece of his that was thought to have been privately commissioned, and never publicly performed before disappearing, has resurfaced. Read more and hear what is likely the first performance in a century and a half.