#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...
scoring
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:
Bear McCreary’s interview with Bruce Broughton on scoring for animation.
Here’s a treat: composer Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, Human Target, Caprica, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) interviews composer Bruce Broughton (Gunsmoke, Logan’s Run, Hawaii Five-O, Dallas, Tiny Toon Adventures, Tombstone). A really superb interview full of great insight, spot-on advice, stories and opinions from two total pros.
Find it on bearmccreary.com here.
David Ricard on cartoon composing.
Considering a career in scoring for film and television? Here’s a 2009 article in Sound on Sound by Dave Ricard that walks through the low-to-mid-budget process nicely, albeit with a bewildering “it’s not so hard” button on the end of it. I don’t know any professional composers who don’t work really, really hard. (Check out my interview with Bear McCreary to hear more on this.) Maybe Dave Ricard is just lucky.
Find out more about David Ricard’s composing, big band, and production music on his website, lesterbeat.com. Or see his list of television scoring credits stretching back about ten years on IMDB. He’s currently scoring Warner Brothers’ The Tom and Jerry Show.
Noteflight – great cloud notation software.
There are so many amazing things happening online now with music and audio software. More and more is possible with software that doesn’t even live on your computer. Noteflight, a cloud-based music notation program, is one example of this. It doesn’t compare to Sibelius and Finale (yet), but considering it’s all taking place through a website… it’s fantastic. And of course, this engenders an entire social facet of the music-creating experience that never existed until now.
Modular score elements for the webseries, “and Boris.”
I have finally gotten around to sharing some of the modular score elements I wrote for David Kronmiller’s webseries, and Boris. There is a lot of music in here that I didn’t write, and I had no part in any editing or mixing of music or sound. I just wrote some fun percussion cues, part acoustic and part synthesized, for David to use in his work wherever and however he chooses.
Favorite feed: Interchanging Idioms by Chip Michael.
I have just added a new favorite feed: Interchanging Idioms by Chip Michael. He has subtitled it “Classical Music of the 21st Century.” I might change that to “Classical Music...
A percussion-based, modular score.
I’m at work on something very interesting—at least to me, a percussionist and composer who works in TV: I’m composing a percussion-only score for a webseries. But… • It’s probably...