studiobee music

This Thursday, I’ll be premiering a new soundscape at the Newfound Music Festival here in St. John’s.  The soundscape that is a joint effort between Paul Bendzsa and me comes entirely from recordings made at the School of Music at Memorial University.  Most of it came from memo type recordings made in and around practice rooms, with a nice swing beat provided by drummer Scott Latham. His fills just fit the track perfectly – you’d never say his performance was actually to a different track!  Even the reverbs are provided courtesy of convolution impulses of Petro-Canada Hall recorded by myself and Mark Belbin a couple of years ago.

The piece will be offered in quadrophonic with the intention of mimicking the sound of moving down the practice room corridor.  The drum kit that provides the backbeat is the biggest out there – it surrounds on four sides!!! 

The piece is part of the Thursday schedule events in the festival that includes lectures, demonstrations and open rehearsals. We intend to play the piece twice – one at the start of the session, followed by an explanation of how it came about, and how it was put together, and then another play of the track for the enlightened!

The full Thursday events list can be found at http://www.mun.ca/music/newmusic/thusched.php and the evening concerts, during which there are many highlights can be found at http://www.mun.ca/music/newmusic/concerts.php.

2008 was a strange year.  It started with incredible uncertainty in my life after Kelly’s initial diagnosis of cancer.  It went on to be much more hopeful, and for those that don’t know, Kelly ended up not having cancer at all.  An incredible blessing, but dealing its own share of issues.  I finished the diploma in Media Composition – something of an anti-climax after putting so much work into it, and feeling rather disappointed with the whole thing, but hey, I have a qualification now and its time to put it to work.

Having a day job really interferes with the ability to do TV/film work that typically has an unreasonably short deadline.  So for 2009, my aim is to improve my production skills and offer up my work to a library.  AudioSparx gets good reviews, and I know people who actually make money through it, so, unforseen circumstances excepted, that’s what I’ll be aiming for. If I can pick up a local short to score too, I’ll be delighted.

I wait with excitement for my new monitors, and will be making some other changes to my studio to improve the sound.  Bye bye KRK’s and M-Audio’s…  hello Dynaudio. 

Gear-wise I have a couple of necessary purchases, including the update of Superior Custom and Vintage (my go-to drum library), but am hoping that I can save this year as I see a computer replacement in my future for a year or so down the road.  When that happens, hopefully, my machine will still be running well as it is now and become a slave to still work for me with larger sample templates and more effects.

I want to work on work-flow.  Many say that working in the real music world, rather than through MIDI, forces your hand to accept what you already did, rather than spending endless hours tweaking.  This is not compromising, this is avoiding obsession.  I can spend hours tweaking only to end up with a slightly changed drum fill in one bar, or sometimes nothing at all!  I want to render down to audio, which will give me some overhead back.  Wow, what a turnaround – MIDI used to be the efficient way to work, and our computers struggled with audio…  now its the other way round.  It’s a logical change, but I never saw it coming ten years ago!

Finally, I want to work on production.  I don’t want my work just to be good, I want it to be fantastic, both in the MIDI world in which it starts and the end audio result.

Summing up -

1. Establish library content
2. Work on a consistent and improved workflow
3. Improve production quality throughout.