This week I started working on a long latent film score project. My friend Holly is working on a documentary film which looks at the house she grew up in, and follows the process of the design and construction of her own home. A few months ago she sent me an early preview clip with example music (Dave Brubeck). It feels great to finally get a start on composing for this project. She graciously agreed to allow me to post this excerpt with my first music sketch.
Continue reading ‘Podcast #5: Home Movie’
Archive for the 'Podcast' Category Page 2 of 3
A fugue is a form of composition which strongly emphasizes counterpoint. J. S. Bach was a master of the fugue and is probably the composer most famously associated with the form. I had this kind of general idea of the fugue but I’ve always wanted to study it closer and understand it enough to incoroporate fugal writing in my own compositions. So, this week was more of a homework assignment than a start of a piece. I found a great introduction to composing a fugue by Dr. Justin Rubin online and also this excellent interactive analysis of a Bach fugue (Fugue No. 2 in c minor from the Well Tempered Clavier, Book 1) linked from the wikipedia entry on fugues.
After studying these references I started following along Dr. Rubin’s intro and did my best to follow the rules and write my own fugue. Incidentally, these interactive online resources are so great because you can hear each excerpt as you encounter it in the text, rather than either taking a text book to a piano and banging it out, or glossing over it in the hopes of coming back to it later.
Here’s the score to what I’ve got so far. I’ve gotten as far as the exposition and the first episode (the last bar). Yes, it’s only 7 bars long. It’s an extremely dense kind of music and it’s easy to take a wrong turn and paint yourself into a corner, where the voices collide, etc. Despite the rules (or because of them) it’s quite fun to work on, and really gives me a greater appreciation for the masters.
They say it takes 21 days to form a habit. So, it appears that I’ve made a habit of working on music everyday. Considering how much I’ve struggled with this in the past, this is quite a milestone.
This week I chose to work on sound design for most of the week and then throw them the results together at the end into some kind of piece of music. All of the sounds in this track, including the drums, were created from scratch with various synth plug-ins in Logic Pro (no samples were used). The plug-ins I used were: Ultrabeat, ES2, FM1, and Sculpture along with very minimal effects.
The title is a silly pun on the band whose sound this track reminded me of, Boards of Canada.
For this week’s podcast I’ve sketched out the beginnings of an orchestra piece. I kept with the method of verbally describing how I imagined the piece before actually working on the music. Here’s a rough score if you’re inclined to follow along.
Continue reading ‘Podcast #2: Orchestra Staccato’
I’m trying something new starting with this week’s podcast. I’m going to see if this blog can coax me into writing more music on a regular basis. Each week I’ll be working on a sketch and posting whatever I’ve got on Sunday nights. The plan is to rotate sketches so on Monday I start working on a different one (either a new one, or once I have a few in the hopper, back to a previous one). I’ve jotted down some ideas for future sketches so I have a bit of a roadmap for the next few weeks. The idea is to create a deadline for myself, which I will keep to for fear of disappointing my (as of yet imaginary) audience. Keep in mind that although I’m posting this publicly, if it says Sketch
in the title of the post, it’s a very rough draft and a lot will probably change in the final version.
This week’s sketch is tentatively titled Chamber Guitar
for no good reason other than all the sounds will be produced by the various stringed instruments laying around the house (I thought there’d be a play on the word chamber too, but so far it just makes it sound fancier than it is). I’m playing with a method I’ve used with some success in the past, which is to simply sit down and imagine the piece before I start playing, and just write a verbal description of what’s in my head. Here’s my description for this piece:
Chamber Guitar Verbal Description
Lush, ethereal wash in background with slow but directed harmonic motion. Low, dull thud begins defining pulse (like a kick drum). Metallic scraping sounds, with some reversed flitter over the top, moving across the stereo field. A chorus of hammer-ons, in twos and threes, at first randomly distributed in space and time lock into a hocketing pattern, eventually defining a theme. These recede into harmonics, played by various guitars, which give way to a massive, sustained sound, with a slow attack and some distortion (mixed with reversed recording?), playing a melismatic, sometimes pitch-bending, melody based on the theme earlier expressed by the hammer-ons.
A bass line forms below. A texture of percussion fades in to join the thuds, with interesting eq (suggest snippets of these at the beginning). The massive sustained sound thins out and the hammer-ons return, this time building into hocketing chords. The percussive texture thins and the scraping metallic stuff comes back in. Focus again on the ethereal wash and the thud, which have been transformed by the previous interjections. Encore of the big sound and all the percussion to finale.
Notes:
- Hammer-ons may be also combined with single staccato plucks.
- Start the piece rising. Middle is combined rising and falling. End is falling only… maybe.
- They may chain together to form melodic fragments (but no single track has the whole fragment).
- They may overlap to form momentary chords, which are related to the ethereal chordal texture.
- They slip in and out of being easily recognizable as guitars.
- Bass line is pitched down guitars.
- The ethereal wash is slowly, gradually evolving throughout the entire piece, but always recognizable.
This week I’ve sketched out some of the first paragraph. It’s a lot more jazz fusion / prog rock that I was going for, but there you have it. I imagined more of a glitchy electronica texture with the big electric guitar sound more like a guitar solo in a Radiohead song whose title escapes me at the moment. Well, on to next week…
