// April 6th, 2012 // No Comments » // Music
Your song(s), Dance the Catwalk, were forwarded to Discovery Channel for
listing # Y120330PO!
Yesss…..! Fingers crossed, let’s go discovery channel, you know you need some of my music on your network…!
// March 30th, 2012 // No Comments » // Music
Did I ever mention that I got my start writing music with simple little new age type piano pieces? Yeah, one of these days I’ll dig some of them out and post them here so you can hear how my songwriting has progressed. But when I saw this listing on Taxi, I felt that I really needed to throw something together, and it was fun! Check out the listing:
A-List Music Supervisor needs ORIGINAL Smooth Jazz and Easy Listening Songs for an upcoming project with a huge national retail chain that wants to appeal to an ADULT audience. Watch the Weather Channel to get a great idea of the type of music they’ll need, and know that your submissions will have to be competitive with artists on the level of George Benson, Chris Standring, Acoustic Alchemy, Boney James, Chuck Mangione, Najee, Mindy Abair, Astrud Gilberto, Melody Gardot, and Antonio Carlos Jobim, etc. to be considered competitive for this. Instrumentals are preferred, but songs with vocals that the supervisor calls “un-intrusive” will also be considered. ORIGINAL SONGS ONLY (no covers, please!).
Here is my take:
// March 27th, 2012 // 1 Comment » // Music
Here’s a track I worked on today that I’m going to submit to a Taxi Listing on thursday.
Here are the instructions:
Contemporary, Dynamic, High-Energy, Pulsating, Beat-Driven POP SONGS **or** INSTRUMENTAL TRACKS a la “Fashion” by Lady Gaga, “Accessory” by Jordyn Taylor, “Short Skirt Long Jacket” by Cake, “Vogue” by Madonna, “Fashion” by David Bowie, “Music Is My Hot Sex” by CSS, “Sexy And I Know It” by LMFAO, or “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5 featuring Christina Aguilera are needed by a Music Supervisor at a Top Cable Network. Quoting the Supervisor, “We need songs for a variety of REALITY SHOWS geared toward a young, female demographic. Songs CAN have club, disco, soul, techno and hip hop, and funk ASPECTS, as long as they are POSITIVE, NOT dark and moody. Retro touches are OK, but PLEASE keep the production and the vibe CONTEMPORARY; that said, Bowie and Madonna are timeless so we included them here for sheer inspiration. We need these songs to inspire people to MOVE… preferably down a catwalk! We ARE NOT looking for full-on Disco. LYRICS should be UNIVERSAL, and exude SELF-CONFIDENCE, GLAMOUR, BEAUTY, PRIDE, SELF-ASSURANCE, SELF-ESTEEM, COMPOSURE, and TEMERITY.” LYRICS should be TV-appropriate. No expletives! MALE and FEMALE Vocals are BOTH okay for this pitch if you’re submitting songs with lyrics. As always, do NOT copy or rip off the referenced artists or songs! Use them only for tempo, feel, mood and texture.
So there you go. I basically was thinking of America’s Next Top Model. I might tweak the mix a bit, but this is essentially it. Let me know your thoughts!
// March 19th, 2012 // 1 Comment » // Music, Video
So I know I haven’t been posting a lot recently. Most of it is for good reasons!
Reason 1: I got engaged.
I’m sure if you read this blog, you’ve already seen the video and some basic photos I took when Tay and I got engaged. Here are some photos that never quite made it to the blog from when we went out for our celebration dinner:
Flowers Delivered to the Table
Enjoying Some Wine!
Dessert
Reason 2: Mass Effect 3
Now, I know this is not necessarily a good reason, but this series of games has been amazing, and Mass Effect 3 is no different. The only difference now is that I have to fight Tayor for Xbox time so that we can both play. I’m happy to say that I finished the game, and it was a great ride… except the ending. I can live with it, but it is a bit of a let down.
Reason 3: Work
I’ve been hard at work these past few months growing my photography business (we’ve nearly booked up every weekend in Sept / Oct!), and doing some video production work.
While I can’t really share the videos that I’ve been working on, one neat side effect of me doing these videos is it gives me an excuse to write stock music to use. So here are a couple that I came up with, just real generic corporate sounding tracks:
So there you have it. I’ve been hard at work, just unfortunately not on selling music. But I’m so thankful for the video opportunities that have been popping up. Here’s hoping that they continue.
// March 19th, 2012 // No Comments » // Music
Well, I actually did write this dubstep track a couple months ago when I said i would. But I wasn’t too happy with the outcome. It’s way harder than I thought it was going to be… mostly because of the stupid wobble bass. Tricky tricky! So I ended up writing a track featuring wobble bass, but I’m not sure if I would call it dubstep. Anyway, enjoy!
// January 20th, 2012 // No Comments » // Music
Wobble bass wobble bass wobble bass! I’m going to try my hand at a dubstep song. For those of you not in the know, dubstep is a new form of electronica which prominently features a wobble bass as a sound. I really like the sound of dubstep (well, a lot of it). It gives me a feeling of hard-rock electronica, except without the use of guitars. It’s hard to explain, but i guess it hits really hard. Give it a listen, and stay tuned to see what, if anything, I can come up with:
Taxi Listing:
NEW LISTING — DUBSTEP INSTRUMENTALS a la Skrillex, Deadmau5, Skream, etc., needed by a former VP of A&R working with a prolific Los Angeles based imprint/management company on high profile video games and movie trailers. Tracks should remain TRUE to the genre and provide the perfect element of DARK, TIGHT, and SYNCOPATED rhythms that give this unique genre its appeal. Be SURE to show off your “wobble bass” – a manipulated low frequency that provides a futuristic-style sound that is synonymous with the genre! The BPM should be around 137-142. AUTHENTIC Dubstep is needed, please don’t submit ’90s-style House, Drum&Bass, Trance tracks, etc. Broadcast Quality is needed (great sounding home recordings are fine). Please submit one to three instrumentals online or via CD. All submissions will be screened and critiqued by TAXI and must be received no later than Monday, February 27, 2012.
TAXI # S120227DI
// July 29th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Music, Video
So now that I have a decent amount of youtube subscribers, i’d love to get more videos uploaded but they all take forever. So I’m thinking about doing the acoustic song thing… no frills, just webcam, acoustic, and singing. That way I can get videos uploaded way more often.
Opinions?
// April 27th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Music, Video
This was actually a pretty quick video to put together! I finished Portal2 a couple nights ago, and thought the ending song was really well written… I love how Coulton changes keys from verse to chorus. I thought I’d take advantage of the catchy tune and lack-of-youtube-covers to try to cover it. I decided to do it on piano, and since I had my camera, Tay’s camera, and Troy’s camera, I was able to film three angles all at once.
Here is the original version, but I do have to warn you, the lyrics are slight spoilers, so if you are hyper-sensitive, i guess you shouldn’t listen.
But you should.
// April 20th, 2011 // No Comments » // Music, Photo, Project 365, Video
Today I started working on some test shots for the video i have in mind for “Can’t Even.” Can you tell it involves multiple “me’s” playing together? 
The test is to try to make it look like we’re actually in the same location playing, even though it’s just a plain white background.
Believe it or not, it’s just one 1000 watt work light I picked up from home depot for $30 lighting the backdrop. The camera was set to f/2.8, 1/80 shutter, and ISO 1000 @ 24fps. Space is definitely an issue. I barely fit on the backdrop with the bass and guitar, and even then you can see the bass headstock falls out of scope for a little bit.
Then there are the drums. I was only testing the shot using the rockband drums, but a real drumset takes up way more room! Ugh! So that light i mentioned earlier was set to camera right, behind where i was standing, but directly parallel to where I was sitting at the rockband set, so you can see how much light is bouncing off me and overexposing me. It may look cool in the long run though.
And no, the video is NOT just going to be me just playing with myself (har har). I actually have a story line in mind.
I was also messing with luma-matting to try to mask out myself so I can have some overlap, although at this stage of my experimenting I have some problems with translucency when say, my bass guy covers up my guitar guy. You can see through the bass to the guitar guy behind him. Any video gurus have any ideas as to how I can auto-mask myself out of a white background without these translucency issues? Please don’t say rotoscope.
Will have to do another round of tests tomorrow.
// April 18th, 2011 // No Comments » // Music, Photo, Project 365
So today was my first day of spring break and all my lessons were cancelled so it was genuinely a day off. I was pretty productive though. If you’ve been following my tweets and stuff, you’ll already know that I started writing again. Which is good, because I’d been struggling with writer’s block for a while now.
Anyway, chorus melody and bridge riff came to me while i was in the shower last week, and I finally sat down to write it last Thursday. Since then I’ve managed to track everything except for the background harmonies, most of the work was done last night and today during the day.
To avoid being loud late at night, I tracked the guitars directly into the computer. This was good because the waveforms are much easier to see and decipher than when they’re compressed and blown out after you run your signal through your amp. The only downside was it was kind of a guessing game as to how my tone would sound in the end. But, at least I got to track guitars at 1 AM at night.
Today I re-amped the signals through my Mesa Boogie F100 and my Jet City 30 watt head using both an SM57 and a 421 to mix the sounds. The drums are DFH Superior 2 (of course) and the bass is direct through the ampeg svx plugin.
I also tracked piano and vocals today, and even managed to get a rough mix to share with you all. It’s at the top of this post, however I’m getting rid of it once the official version is done! I ordinarily wouldn’t even share this version, but I know there’s only about 25 – 30 people who read this anyway, so… I don’t see any harm in it!
Anyway, you can tell things are still unbalanced, and it’s missing harmonies, but it should be done pretty soon! I even have a video idea, I will keep my fingers crossed that I can get it filmed this week too. This is definitely the fastest turnaround I’ve had with a song from conception to completion. Under a week… so far!
Here’s an overhead shot of my desk. Such is my workstation… I’ve labeled everything to be helpful. Hah. ^_^
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