Today I've added several new flute quartets to my site in a new album titled "Four Flutes". I've been playing with a new flute quartet lately (Connie Backus, Chuck Dick, Elaine Austin, and myself), and I've made some new arrangements for us to play. I also have some more ideas for pieces that I think would work well with a flute quartet and I'll post them on my album page as I complete them. We'll be performing some of these pieces at my Spring Recital in May, so hopefully some of you will be able to see us live.

In other news, I conducted the entire Mesa City Band concert last night at Venture Out (Larry will be out for the rest of the season but is recovering nicely). Anyway, the venue has a beautiful concert hall and it was a pleasure to perform there. The band sounded great and we had a very large audience so it was a very satisfying evening all around.

As a final unrelated thought: this time of year is festival season and I can't help but miss the long rehearsals and preparations of the school bands and orchestras as we got ready to compete. It was always a very satisfying process, and I hope to be involved with school groups again someday. Of course I also miss going to Disneyland with the kids. :-)

Several people have asked me about my use of the computer with the Praise Band at St. Mark's, and I've put together a brief rundown of how I make my backing tracks.

First of all, efficiency is key because (at least lately) I have been recording several backing tracks each week. Luckily, this process has become pretty routine for me. I begin by recording either a lead track with the melody or a piano track if it also carries the melody (sometimes I don't want the piano doubling the melody). Anyway in this case, the piano line has the melody in it and so I used it along with a click track to help me keep the beat.

By the way, "How Majestic Is Your Name" is a classic Michael W. Smith piece from the 80s. Before recording this, I watched him perform it from 1982 w/ Amy Grant (on YouTube). At St. Mark's we don't do anything so dramatic (or fast!--if you watch the video, skip past the introduction to 1:30 to see what I mean.). Even so, I always love to take inspiration from from what I can, and I find him to be a fantastic musician and songwriter.

Anyway, after the basic melody is down I can start to layer other things on top of what I've recorded. I set Logic up to use a drum kit with my keyboard (I don't own a drum set... yet ;-) Here's the layout of my most-used drums (for reference, the lowest C shown here is C1).

So, with my piano track playing aloud, I will practice and create a drum part for the piece. I prefer to 'perform' it as I record it, rather than program it like a drum machine. This way, the grooves and the fills sound natural. I tried to make a video of myself playing the drums, but I couldn't hold the camera while I played the drum part because it takes two hands. Anyway, you can imagine how it might look to play the drums in this way. Here's the recording of the next step:

I don't like to over-orchestrate the backing tracks, so I don't do a lot more after this point. I firmly believe that the live musicians should be doing most of the work. However, the bass player in the band is often away so I have been recording a bass track for when he's gone. Originally I was plugging in my bass and making the track using the actual instrument, but lately--in the name of expediency--I have been using the keyboard with one of Logic's many high-quality bass samples. This way, I don't get quite the realistic sound of flesh on string, but it does allow me to make the recordings a lot faster since there is no additional set up and synching required.

At this point I can simply use the various mixers and editors in Logic to tweak anything that needs tweaking and then I extract each instrument as its own track. These tracks are then imported separately into Mainstage so I can use them individually or in combination depending upon the instrumentation that I need. I'll explain that process in my next post, "Making Music in Mainstage".

This is something that I've been thinking about for a while now and I've finally gotten it started. In the process of developing my own jazz chops while playing with Swing Memories, I knew that I also wanted to write pieces that I can use with my students to develop their chops. Now that my concert schedule isn't as demanding I have the time to do it. I intend for each piece to not only introduce jazz concepts and idioms, but to challenge the students with improvisation.

Anyway, go check out my new album "Rubber, Meet Road" and the first piece in the album, "Get Off My Beat". As always, let me know what you think!

I've finally posted the third piece for Sounds of a Sphere. I've been tinkering with this for some time, mostly because of the demanding concert & rehearsal schedule I've had for the past few weeks. Speaking of which: the swing band played at the VFW this past Saturday night and it went very well. The crowd wasn't as large as when we were there in November, but they were just as enthusiastic. I was glad to see friendly faces there! Anali, Daphne, Tarl and Charlie all danced and had a great time. Thanks for coming!

Anyway, I've titled this new piece "Unconformity". Well, actually Moses suggested the name and I liked it. Like the other pieces in the album it is based upon a Mars image from the HiRISE satellite. I arranged it for solo piano, although I considered writing it for synth. I may rearrange it for some electronic instruments sometime in the future, but at this point I really wanted to finish it. Also, I'm hesitant to write these pieces for electronic instruments because it almost seems to be a too obvious instrumentation; thanks to years of watching B-rated sci-fi movies my brain tends to associate anything extra-terrestrial with electronic and synthesized sounds.

Like the other pieces it is pretty dissonant--that's just hard to avoid considering the musical source. However, the rhythms are somewhat jazzy, no doubt due to all the jazz that I've been practicing and rehearsing with the swing band. I find that a catchy rhythm can make even the most dissonant melodies and harmonies quite listenable.

As always, I appreciate the emails and comments that I receive about my pieces. Thanks for listening!

I've made the switch to hosting my scores at Sibelius Music. After some investigation, I'm convinced that this is the best way to go for now. They have a great collection of music and it is well organized, presented and maintained. I have been a long-time user of Sibelius, having used their software for composition since the first version of it came out in the late 90s.

Otherwise, there isn't a lot to report other than that there are a lot of projects that are underway. I've got new pieces for "Shades of Silver and String" and "Sounds of a Sphere", a new flute quartet (to be performed at one of the Silveridge orchestra concerts), as well as a new composition for concert band (to be performed at one of the Mesa Band concerts). My recital of students and friends (December 5th) is coming up and we're rehearsing a lot for that. Then, of course, there's the swing band, the concert band, the orchestra... Not to mention that Anali and I are attending the Phoenix Symphony this Friday for Dvorak's New World Symphony. It's a great mixture of composing, teaching, rehearsing, performing, and attending concerts--the five 'food groups' of any healthy musician's life.

Oh, right... Thanksgiving is tomorrow too.  :-)  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I'm pleased to finally post my new piece, "Tune My Heart" for my album Shades of Silver and String. I've been working on this piece for far too long. There are definitely compositions that become nothing like I originally intended, and this is one of those compositions. Sure, there were some distractions that extended the composition process--rehearsals, concerts, other compositions, etc. But there was something about the original conception of the piece that held me up. I'm not sure what it is, but I might have a better idea about it once I've put some distance between myself and the music.

I almost didn't include a reference to the original hymn tune in this piece. At the very last minute I finally decided to squeeze it in for four measures. Certainly, anyone familiar with the original hymn (Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing) will hear the rhythmic similarity. However, the original tune is never entirely heard in my composition. When looking back at the other pieces in this album, I can see a progression away from a straight arrangement of the hymn (such as in The Beauty of the Earth) and a more 'fuzzy' interpretation of the hymn (as occurs in Tune My Heart and, to a lesser degree, in the others). As much as I enjoy composing original melodies and placing my own musical stamp on these hymns, I think I will steer more directly back towards straight arrangements for the final pieces of the album.

Anyway, check out the new piece and, as always, let me know what you think.

On another note, I have decided to host all of my scores at Sibelius Music (www.sibeliusmusic.com). They offer a better method for marketing Scorch scores. As soon as I get all my scores transferred, I'll place links up by each piece to the score on their website.

Here's the latest piece for Sounds of a Sphere, titled "Russell's Velvet Dunes".

I haven't had this much of an excuse to be grossly atonal since a composition lesson in college when I was asked to create a piece of music using random elements.  For that project I created a system by which a piece of music could be created with various rolls of dice.  It was a lot of fun and the piece was quite a hit with my wife (then girlfriend) to whom I dedicated it.  It was titled "You Are So Sexy You Make My Blood Boil: Blub, Blub".  Seriously.

With Russell's Velvet Dunes I wanted more of a challenge than the one I gave myself with Victoria, so I decided to actually write some counterpoint and derive a more complex harmonic progression.  This worked out well also with my decision to write for string quartet, which is especially well-suited to this kind of counterpoint.  The composition is largely based upon two melodic bits that I mined from the raw image data.  The first (which I call Velvet) is the melody in the first violin for the first six measures of the piece.  The second (which I call Dune) is a 10 measure melody that you hear played unaltered by the viola (1:13) and then the second violin (1:34) in the first half of the piece.

I decided to let "Dune" become the harmonic framework for much of the rest of the piece.  This melody begins with an leap of a tritone (the most dissonant interval) and is followed by a major seventh (the second most dissonant interval), so it is very distinctive and destroys any sense of tonality.  The melody also contains several minor seconds (also very dissonant).  These intervals form much of the harmonic progression on which I set the melodies.  If any of the melodies sound too dissonant for your ear, blame it on the picture--they made me do it.  (The funny thing about dissonant melodies, though, is that once you listen to them a few times they start to sound better as you become more familiar with them).

Halfway through the piece (~2:00) I increase the tempo and modulate into G# minor.  I wanted to create a more lively texture and I wanted to continue to force these musical materials into an increasingly tonal structure.  This turned out to be a bit like forcing a dozen greased mice into a bread pan.  At this point "Velvet" comes back, although it is presented much faster than it was before.  The piece ends in a relatively solid G# minor cadence.

Anyway, I don't want to bore everyone with a play-by-play of the entire composition.  Suffice it to say that the raw melodies played a part in every measure of the composition.  It was a lot of fun to write, and I'm looking forward to starting a third piece for this album.  (After I finish "Tune My Heart").

A friend of mine, Moses Milazzo, asked me the other day if it were possible to take the data from a digital picture and convert it into music.  Moses works on a project called HiRISE, which is a high-resolution camera that is in orbit around Mars.  After discussing it for a bit, he wrote a program to convert the digital data from an image into MIDI information.  Not long after that he sent me a MIDI file with about five minutes worth of music--the raw product of his conversion software.  By itself the music is interesting, but lacks the structure needed to keep it musically engaging.  My task, then, was to provide the structure and musical interest.

I've posted the first result of this collaboration: Victoria, based upon an image of Victoria Crater on Mars.  I enjoyed the compositional challenge and am looking forward to creating more music based on images of Mars.

Posted a new electronic ambient piece today: "Out of Mind".
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Several weeks ago I read a review of a documentary about the history of the text adventure.  It is aptly titled "Get Lamp."  (That's a Zork reference, if you don't know what I'm talking about.)  Anyway, in the reading of this review the author mentioned that the documentary had great music composed by Zoë Blade.  Now, after listening to her music for a few weeks, I decided that I definitely liked it and wanted to try my hand at this genre of ambient music.

Isn't it great that my affection for archaic computer games could lead me to a new genre of music?  Of course, I feel like I have ADD because I keep wanting to make the song develop and change, but ambient music seems to progress at a slower pace than music in other genres.  It's a good exercise, because it forces me to slow down.

Do we ever get anything right on the first try?  Do we every really get anything right?

Music is great because it's (mostly) understood that it will never be perfect.  (True, people who only consume music through recordings might not understand this, but all musicians do).  Aside from the imaginative and creative aspects of music that appeal to me, I feel like it encapsulates all aspects of humanity in its creation and performance.  That is, when it's performed perfectly and spectacularly, it is a moving experience that affects all who participate in the audience and the performance.  Performances like that give me the chills, whether I'm performer or listener, and afterwards there's a stillness in which all in attendance seem to have reached a mutual awareness of that brief moment of perfection--a slice of heaven, if you will.

And, then again, when music is performed with flaws, it can be a reminder to all that we are only mortal and fleshy creatures that strive for perfection but often do not achieve it.  This isn't a bad thing, because it can bring people together in a way that emphasizes their shared humanity.  A perfect performance often sets the performers apart.  The flawed performance is inclusive--if the attitude of the performer and audience is right.

I'm reminded of the famous roof-top performance by the Beatles in London at Apple Studios in 1969.  This was a period of the band's existence that was full of tensions and interpersonal problems, as revealed in the film "Let It Be".  However, when they began to play their impromptu concert in downtown London, the joy shown on their faces is telling.  The performance was rough, to say the least.  The most obvious screw-up is John forgetting a line of lyrics to the song "Don't Let Me Down".  But he's grinning as he stumbles over the words and he and Paul share a look that reveals their deep friendship, based on their music and love of performing together.

Anyway, I hadn't meant to expound at such length.  All I was really planning to do was preface the fact that I edited and reposted my piece "The Beauty of the Earth" after having performed it last week.  The changes are really pretty slight; just little tweaks and additions that I wanted to add as I rehearsed it with Elaine Austen, a flutist in the church band.  The performance actually went very well and was well-received by the congregation.  However, I think that many people who create things--whether art, research papers or presentations--can understand that those creations are never quite finished.  Maybe that's okay... as long as we meet our deadlines.