Been a while. I’ve been getting a handle on songwriting harmony in BerkleeMusic’s BMW-133 Songwriting Workshop: Harmony with (the awesome) Shane Adams. This week was the first I’d actually put something complete together. I’ve upgraded to Win 7, which meant saying good-bye to the Tascam FW-1804 and replacing it with a PreSonus FireStudio Mobile. This is the first stuff recorded with that unit, which – especially considering it’s about 1/10th the size and has almost the same capability – is pretty darned nice.

Harmonically, this tune stays primarily Ionian for the most part, but borrows the Lydian II and the Mixolydian bVIImaj7 at different points.

The verse section uses two distinct power progressions: I IV and I VIm IIm V, which are both in the list of Ionians in the book. The second pass through the verse replaces the Ionian IIm with the Lydian II – actually II7sus4 & II7, followed by a V with falling bass.

The chorus uses an idea that’s similar but not identical to the last Ionian power progression in the book – the one with the falling bass line, i.e., prosodically (Shane?) ‘going down’. The progression is IV IV/bIV IIm V I I/VII VIm VIm7, repeating, and ends with bVII IV V.

Sorry if the audio is a little hard to follow and the vocal is a bit strained. I literally wrote, threw it together and rough mixed it in about 4 hours – that’s two acoustic guitars, electric guitar, bass, electric solo, MIDI drum track and a vocal. *pant* It sounded incomplete without at least these parts. Strings and piano will be added later, I’m thinking.

Hard Road Down – MP3 – 128kBps – 4.25MB – 4:31 min.

Speaking of Redu-ing stuff… I spent a few hours this evening trying to restore some of the Giant City tunes Bob Bruning originally collected on CD a few years back. Given what he had to work with – which I believe was mostly cassette copies of copies of demos and live recordings – the quality was good but not great. Certainly fun to listen to… even if you had to be there for some of it.

I re-ripped a few of these off of the CDs Bob sent and tried to restore some of the original quality by subtracting out some of the mud, boosting the dynamic range and restoring some of the low and high end. This was done with SONAR and a bundled mastering plugin called Vintage Channel VC-64. The Sonitus:fx Compressor and Reverb plug-ins are also used. In some cases the cassette tape hiss is enhanced a little, unfortunately, but I consider that a small price to pay for the added clarity.

Also, as I was doing this, I discovered a tune I’d completely forgotten about. For some reason I’d never pulled this from the CDs and neglected to include it on the “Compositions” page. It’s a great tune – Tell Me Lies. IMHO, we’re coming around to a point in the industry where it’s quite likely fashionable again. Along with the rest… hey, it’s nostalgia at its best.

These files are a little larger than usual – in the 6-10MB range. I apologize if the d/l speed is a little slower here than usual. My provider seems to be rationing bandwidth on-and-off lately.

Tell Me Lies – 6.8M

Oh, Money! – 8.0M
Fly Away – 9.5M
Wizards – 8.0M
I Woudn’t Want To Be Like You – 9.3M
The Answer’s In The Music – 6.5M
Seems To Me – 7.5M
The Same Old Thing – 8.0M
Shakin’ Me – 7.4M
You’re The Only One – 8.1M
All I Wanna Do – 8.0M
Say Something Right – 6.7M

The vocal on this is a little embarrassing (and a lot incomplete – not sure if I’ll get a chance to finish it), but I wanted to post it just because the guitar stuff on it is so much fun – done by my brother Tony.

This was a mid-term project for Arranging: Rhythm Section. The assignment was to take an existing composition and (re-)arrange it. I chose Tequila Sunrise, cranked up the tempo, transposed it up a step (to Amaj), created a chorus (based on an early version of the Eagles’ original), added an intro section and an ending. Everything is synthesized except for the vocal and the guitars – please excuse the flat (non-automated) mix, which isn’t intended to sound great, just demonstrate the arrangement. If the solo at the end sounds in any way funky, blame me not Tony – I cloned it and pulled some key-shifting tricks to get it to (mostly) fit.

Enough qualifiers… enjoy!

Tequila Sunrise Redux – MP3 – 192kBps – 5.2MB – 3:48 min.

Score: Tequila Sunrise Redux – PDF

At least that’s the title for now.

Inspired by this guy, of course. First attempt at a Travis / fingerstyle composition.

Rainy Day Rag – MP3 – 160kBps – 5.2MB – 4:31 min.

Hey, I just uploaded the final project MP3 for Orchestration 1. Here it is below – the new and improved version, first 2:30 of the full Allegro for Guitar and Orchestra.

Also linked below is the full six+ minute, guitar-only version, for reference. Might be fun to listen to that first if you haven’t heard it before.

It’s getting there.

Volo Flamenco – guitar only – MP3 – 128kBps – 6.4MB – 6:42 min.

Volo Flamenco – using SONAR 8 & Kontakt 3 – MP3 – 160kBps – 2.9MB – 2:27 min.

We met with some friends to (finally) catch Tommy Emmanuel in person at the Patriot Place Showcase Live venue last night. Tommy was in superb form. It was quite an experience to be sitting only about 40′ from the world’s greatest living guitarist.

Some highlights were And So It Goes, which brought tears to my eyes; Somewhere Over the Rainbow, ditto; the low end in Initiation (the one point where the P.A. volume was appropriate) literally shook me in my seat; and the Rick’n'Tommy duet to close the main show was great fun with some classics like Wake Up Little Suzy and Love Me Tender. Tommy did an extended encore, which included his awesome Beatles medley, and he even received a $1 tip from one of the waitresses! Yeah, that (read: she) was a little weird.
 

Only three minor disappointments: the house system was cranked up WAY too loud (I was sitting right next to the sound guy, so there really was no excuse – except that he must be partly deaf), Those Who Wait was MIA, and Guitar Boogie was played on an ancient 1934 Kalamazoo into a flat condenser dynamic-looking mic (fun, but the tune literally loses ALL its punch that way).

Everything else was an absolute delight – including Rick Price who has a great voice and an excellent stage presence. We all liked his music and his performance a lot.

BIG THANKS to Brian for spotting the tickets for this when the tour was added!

Links to additional pics below. Here’s hoping he was able to get that shirt back to Wal-Mart before heading on to Norfolk-Norfolk-Norfolk.

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10

One of the workshops we did last week came out fun. This was an assignment that started with some canned drum loops (you’ll hear them), to which we were to add orchestral instruments.

This cue was a shot at something between James Bond (recent vintage) and the Bourne series film scores.

Adding Orchestral Material to Drum Loops – MP3 – 160kBps – 870kB – 0:44 min.

Prior to this past week we also had an assignment to sequence a passage from Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5. I held back to the letter of the assignment and only sequenced the melody.

Ben has since provided the score and I located the section containing one of the two examples he used. Here’s my stab at the full (string) orchestra arrangement. A little heavy-handed and not nearly as elegant as the original, but we’re making progress…

Bruckner Symphony No. 5 Excerpt – MP3 – 192kBps – 1.28MB – 0:56 min.

The Orchestration I course at Berklee, with Ben Newhouse, is turning out to be quite informative, extensive and enjoyable. I’m learning loads of new things each week (and not having to grope around ‘experimenting’ in order to do it).

This past week had a number of interesting workshop activities.

First was a short section extracted from Bach’s Chorale #185. The activity was to arrange the first four (full) bars of the following for full strings (Violins I and II, Viola, Cello and Double Bass).
 

I ended up with this. Here’s the MP3:

Bach Chorale 185 Excerpt – MP3 – 192kBps – 595kB – 0:25 min.

Turned out that this export wasn’t what I’d originally produced. As it happens, when you close a SONAR project and then reload, Kontakt 3 (the plug-in we’re using as a sampling synth) doesn’t reload the actual instrument configuration that was saved. Thankfully, I’d saved a preset, and was able to reproduce what I’d really wanted:

Bach Chorale 185 Excerpt – fixed – MP3 – 192kBps – 599kB – 0:25 min.

The difference is subtle, but the second one should sound less like mush.

The next workshop activity was also interesting. We were given a 4-chord progression – Am – F – C – E – which we then needed to orchestrate as a harmonic arrangement. One of the examples for this activity was Ben’s “Desperaux’s Love Theme” (more of Ben’s work here). I had some fun with this. I hope this is what he was expecting. Here’s the music, with a melody added after the progression is established:

Harmonic Arrangement – Am-F-C-E – MP3 – 128kBps – 770kB – 0:48 min.

Finally, the week’s assignment was kind of the reverse. We started off with a melody and chords:
 

From this we needed to come up with an orchestration around the melody for full strings. I chose to write for solo cello (duh) but unfortunately, the Kontakt 3 sample library doesn’t include a solo cello sample, so the ensemble legato ‘voice’ had to suffice. It’s a little electronic sounding, but gets the point across:

String Orchestration – MP3 – 128kBps – 525kB – 0:33 min.

Overall it’s been an ‘extra’ education (above learning orchestration) getting up to speed on Sibelius 6, Kontakt 3 and SONAR 8 PE all at the same time. The SONAR course from last term left me with just enough information to get going – far from what was promised in the course description. That’s life, I suppose. One of the only valuable things from that course was a SONAR template with a preset mastering plug-in all set up. I load my finished audio exports into that, tweak EQ as needed and export as a master to 44.1kHz/16bit for MP3. It rounds things out nicely without a lot of work.

Getting Sibelius 6, Kontakt 3 and SONAR 8 to all play nice together has been challenging. I’ve worked out a system where I can compose in Sibelius, export MIDI to SONAR and then load a String Orchestra preset into the Kontakt plug-in. At that point the Piano Roll view provides a quick way to delete Sibelius’ MIDI CC data (I keep the Velocity) and start adjusting Modulation and Expression to get dynamics.

Coming up with that workflow required about a week of experimenting and understanding the various quirks involved – like Kontakt’s annoying habit of resetting the instrument volume faders to -6db (or less) if the volume is adjusted in ANY way in SONAR. That was pretty frustrating, let me tell you. Once the volume has been modified, it’s no longer possible to set the corresponding Kontakt instrument to anything more than -6db. If you do, it just gets reset when playback starts. Not sure what’s going on there, but deleting Sibelius’ exported MIDI CC#7 (Volume) data before playing back takes care of it as long as you don’t touch the track’s volume. I tend to bounce each MIDI track to its own audio track – as hot as it will go without exceeding 0db – so I don’t usually adjust the MIDI channels’ volume faders anyway.

Lots of good things to say about these three software packages, once you start to get below the surface and get comfortable with a workflow. The bulk of time is now spent actually composing, rather than fighting with technology – as it should be!

Sibelius 6, in particular, is pretty impressive. It’s about as close to a music word processor as one might imagine. Once you get handy with the key combinations, you can literally type your music into the staff as you go, pausing now and then to reposition the cursor with the mouse. The thing even understands expression and technique entries, and will play back pizzicato mezzo piano, follow crescendos and diminuendos and play fermata and staccato notes if that’s what you’ve indicated. Pretty cool.