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A Joyful Beginning
This week’s piano solo is short, but so sweet! I had to share it here, too. Enjoy!
The birds are singing, and the eastern sky holds beautiful hues of vibrant orange-red along with the first hints of sapphire blue. Your heart is bright and alive as you sit up for A Joyful Beginning to the day.
Perfection in Composer-Land
In music composing perfection is more subjective than in fields, such as hard math or science, where pure logic and unambiguous numbers decide the quality of work. There is still skill building in music, of course. You strengthen your fingers to play an instrument reliably, and work to master tricky rhythms and chord progressions. But the other side is emotion, and that is deeply personal. Did the singer seem heartfelt to you…or whiny? Did the melody make you happy, or did it fail to connect?
Over time, I’ve realized that my truest goal is to pull you into feeling what I feel in the music. The perfect rhythm, the perfect pitch…that stuff is secondary to the feeling I’m attempting to evoke. That said, a bad note, just like a bad plot point, can take you right out of the story woven in the music. So in regard to perfection the question becomes: Is the feeling consistently coming through, or is something getting in the way? Maybe the piano is too harsh, or I’m using the wrong instrument entirely. Maybe the rhythms just aren’t “there” yet, or the melody isn’t sung with enough confidence…or enough vulnerability. It’s a real thing when the music flows just right, and achieving that requires putting in the time to develop great technique. But most of all, the feeling must take center stage.
I’ve spent a lot of time seeking a proverbial pat on the head, or blessing, from those I see as more successful than I am in the field of music. Ah, if only someone would tell me, yes, it is time! You are now a “professional” composer. To this end, I obtained a degree in composing, and a second degree in sound engineering. I’ve done a lot of musical skill building. I’ve mixed a lot, and written a lot. But no one, no one is ever going to give you a clear road map to making composing a career. At some point, I’ve had to sit down and think about what I need to be to join that elite club. And it is tied into the concept of perfection.
To get closer to “perfect,” I can work hard to adhere to certain standards of production quality, of pitch, and rhythm. But at the end of the day, after years of studying this stuff, I’ve finally realized that the skill building in mixing and music is ongoing. You’ll never know it all. You’ll never know even a fraction of it all! And you’ll never stop learning.
It doesn’t mean you can’t make it a career now. For me, I had to realize that the real purpose of music, the ultimate point to it and what deeply attracts me to it, is the emotion.
Perfection isn’t in sounding like everyone else, or in sounding so clean and pristine that your music could’ve been produced by a robot. Perfection is when you, the listener, feel what I feel when I am playing the piano, or singing a song. I want you to feel the emotion I worked hard to create in that orchestration.
Do you feel it? If you do, that’s perfection.
An addendum on #Perfection: For me, I’ve found the term “perfectionist” can sometimes be a cover for the deeper fear of inadequacy regarding one’s work, particularly when someone can’t get past that hump of calling something done. I had to consciously decide to push through that fear. There’s no other way. Be like Miles Morales in Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse. Realize that you have something to bring, and take the leap off that building. But you have to believe in yourself first.
Feel free to comment on this article on my LinkedIn page.
An exciting new adventure on a distant world.
A long running hobby of mine has been story telling. Now, through Patreon, I’ve taken one long form story (originally a trilogy of novels) and am re-working it into an audio book with original music to supplement the story and characters. It follows a brother and sister on an alien world, their first encounters with visitors from the stars, and how everybody- including the visitors- must deal with their world, as they know it, being utterly changed. You can follow the adventure on Patreon at patreon.com/vardamusic, and through my youtube video updates as well. I hope to see you there!
Hope Rekindled
A stirring deep inside slowly grows into the striking sense that something good is on the horizon, that there are beautiful things yet to come. For the first time in a while, you feel like breathing deeply. This is the feeling of Hope Rekindled.
This is the second song in a series of weekly piano solos for you to enjoy, all under the playlist “Weekly Piano.”
The Heart’s Nostalgia
Something sweet, something lost. Something unexpected brings forth a beautiful memory you can’t help but linger on for a few moments. You feel The Heart’s Nostalgia.
This song represents the first of ongoing weekly piano solos for you to enjoy, all under the playlist “Weekly Piano.”
Time: A “found object” song featuring clocks
“Time” is an original song featuring piano, voice, and found objects recorded at McGuire’s Clock Shop. Speaking of which, the people who own and run that store are wonderful folks, and the shop is fascinating! I recommend dropping by for a great experience, particularly if you’re a fan of antiques, clockwork mechanisms, fine craftsmanship, or anachronisms in general, since some clocks featured there give you the feeling of stepping back into another century. I’ve found it to be a relaxing, magical experience every time I’ve stopped by. 🙂 You can check out their website here: McGuire’s Clocks.
In “Time”, you’ll hear the low ringing of a grandfather clock, as well as various captured tickings, clicking, and whirring sounds I recorded using my nifty old Sony minidisk recorder, which can capture audio in 24 bit and 48k samples per second. (And that is not too shabby! This particular model isn’t available anymore through Sony, but eBay generally has a few.) I also edited a video to go with the song, available to watch above as well as on youtube directly, right here. In retrospect, I might invest in a better tool for stabilizing video at some point, since I worked with an iPad as a camcorder, and obtained footage by hand. (The stabilization built into the iPad is pretty terrific, but can’t fix all the shakiness!) Next time I’ll do better, but this should still serve to showcase some really beautiful clockwork mechanisms, as is. 🙂
Countdown: Silent, Short Film with Original Music.
“Countdown” Credits:
Directed by Mark Bristol
http://markbristol.squarespace.com
Cinematography by Todd McMullen
https://www.toddmcmullen.com
Acting by Roger Wilson and Becky Page Packard
Music Composed, Recorded, and Mixed by Elbereth Howard
Soloists
Alex Armstrong
Boris Chalakov
Ryan Coppin
Amy Gravell
Elbereth Howard
Delaine Leonard
Kevin Rodriguez
Teresa Karine Sandragorsian
Chamber Orchestra
Luis Gonzalez-Aponte
Esteban Borjas III
Greg Bowen
Raquel Gomez
Dylan Ilseng
Luke Jamar
Jordan LePage
Daniella Martinez
Jackeline Martinez
Alec Miranda
Owen Morgan
Samantha Muckleroy
Angel Raygoza
Azariah Reese
Claudia Thais Ruiz
Kevin Ryan
Zubin Solis
Mitch Vehlewald
Jaime Xavier Vidal
Some background about the project:
Countdown was directed by Mark Bristol, a highly skilled storyboard artist and director. (He’s worked in the television, film, commercial, and video game industries. You can check out his website here.) He hired me previously to score music for a short war re-enactment film featuring soldiers fighting on the Pacific front in World War II (viewable here), and later reached out again about Countdown. Countdown features a quiet, intimate story centered around a bleak situation in which two people are faced with a finite, steadily dwindling source of food and water. It’s a powerful story about the enduring power of true love, and spoke to me strongly.
A Special Note
Countdown served as the Capstone Project for my Sound Recording Technologies degree at TSU. I owe thanks to many people who helped me take the music I composed to a final product. In particular, I’m grateful to all the students who volunteered their time to come into the studio and record. There is a world of difference between MIDI mockups and the real deal. It was a learning process from start to finish, and a joy to make the leap from MIDI to real performances. I look forward to working with those players who choose to pursue studio work on future projects!
Since this is a blog, I thought it would be useful (maybe to somebody, someday) to briefly outline the steps taken and tools used to bring Countdown’s soundtrack to completion. Here you go:
Scoring: Finale is my music notation program of choice, but in my case, I started at the piano, wrote by hand, and then transferred my notes to the computer. I also jumped back and forth between Finale and Pro Tools (which I’ve loaded Kontakt and EastWest orchestral libraries into as plugins). In Pro Tools, I could time out specific points in the film (which I imported into Pro Tools) and thus knew precisely how the music had to fit. (Lots of Pro Tools markers were used. ) With Countdown, getting things lined up right was pretty time consuming, because I wrote the music to fit quite closely to scene changes and precise moments in the story. Also, given that Countdown is a silent film, the music’s role would be center stage throughout, and arguably just as powerful a part of the story telling as the actors on screen, which made the timing even more important. Once getting a sold draft of the score in place in Finale, I pulled the MIDI file into Pro Tools one last time as a fresh import, double checked the timing, then bounced everything, with video attached, to get feedback on the MIDI mockup from a few trusted mentors (in my case, professors Erickson and Hickinbotham from TSU’s Sound Recording Technologies program), along with Mark Bristol, the film’s director. Once getting the go-ahead, I returned to Finale to make a few changes and finish out the score, adding additional dynamic markings and other markings musicians expect to see (while working on the rough MIDI mockup, I keep that stuff minimal). I created two scores; a cue score and a conductor score, visually tweaking the conductor score in particular to be sure it would be easy to follow. With that complete, I extracted the individual parts, and visually cleaned those up as well.
Musician Gathering: The majority of musicians were TSU music students interested in studio recording. I found them by attending concerts, being present at rehearsals, weekly instrumental studio gatherings, string focused gatherings, and by walking up to people to explain the project. It took six sessions to get all the music recorded, with soloists, strings, brass, piano, and harp all having their own separate sessions, plus overdubs. The number of sessions was partly due to space constraints, and partly due to the logistics of getting everybody in the same place at the same time, on an unpaid, volunteer basis (and during a busy school semester, to boot). These guys were great sports, and fun to work with. I learned a lot about what works and doesn’t work along the way, in regard to seeking and finding talent. Ultimately, it will become a more streamlined process, as I continue to build a network of musicians in my transition (and theirs) from student to music industry professional.
Session Setup Decisions and Issues. Given that the score calls for classically trained musicians, my goal was to create as natural an ensemble setup in each session as possible. I was certain that everyone’s performances would improve if they were able to read and respond to each other in the same physical space. I also love the way each individual’s sound will intermingle with the others when in a shared space, and wanted the opportunity to capture that as well. Given the space and logistical restraints I already mentioned, the first session relied heavily on a MIDI mockup of the music along with my conducting, given that there were many gaps of time in which no one in the session was playing. Each subsequent session utilized an ever evolving compilation of MIDI mixed with prior session recordings. That said, even with many sessions being necessary, after a lot of massaging in post production, the result still feels like a proper ensemble performance. That is because, for every session, regardless of the ensemble size, I consistently placed two sets of room microphones in the same locations. I also placed the musicians (with some overlap due to the room size) in their relative positions based on a traditional orchestral layout. The recording is from an audience perspective, with high strings to the left, low strings to the right, etc. Invariably, the predominant sound you hear in the mix, for every instrument except possibly for brass, is the “room” sound, which is a blend between the room microphones: a spaced pair of AT4050s, and a pair of Royer 122s in a Blumlein configuration.
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Each soloist also had one to two close microphones, and each pair of string players in the string section shared a microphone. Brass also shared microphones in pairs, except for one brief phrase of music that called for a single French horn, which was overdubbed with the horn player more centered on the mic. The piano and harp, between them, had over a dozen microphones, some of which I didn’t use (for example, a pair of Fatheads placed a foot above the piano strings, and a foot back from the hammers, which was meant for a darker sound, didn’t make the cut.) For the harp in particular, I learned that more space is essential to the sound; a microphone set too close doesn’t capture the interaction between the strings in a way that sounds natural to the ear.
Editing and Mixing. This is where I learned just what I should have done differently prior to post-production, to be frank! A lot of editing and mixing was needed that should not have been necessary, had I planned ahead more effectively prior to each recording session. For example, the music is slower and in an easier key, even for the transposing instruments, but given its somewhat rubato nature, I clearly underestimated the time we would need to come together as an ensemble. The end result was, given the time I had planned for each session, a set of recordings that were almost right in regard to timing, but just not precise enough. Since I needed to match the music very precisely to the film, there was no wiggle room for the give and take you might get in a live performance. I had to edit everything, extensively, sometimes even splicing single solo phrases multiple times to arrive at the result you hear in the film mix. Suffice to say, I learned many lessons along the way, most of which center around how to avoid the same mistakes next time!
Ultimately, the entire editing and mixing process, in regard to timing, dynamics, pitch, tone, etc, all boiled down to creating a mirage of sorts. In other words, as the mixing engineer, I continually ask the listener to focus on one thing while disregarding another. It’s fascinating to compare the original takes with the final mix; the contrast is stark, because so much was altered in some form or another. That said, even from the start, I loved the studio recordings. MIDI mockups, even with excellent orchestral plugins, don’t hold a candle to an ensemble of musicians breathing energy and skill and emotion into a real performance of the music.
Lessons I’ve Learned About Music Production
Get the foundation right. There is no substitute for (as my professor Gary Hickinbotham likes to say) a solid foundation. With that in place, the time spent on editing, mixing, overdubs – all aspects of post production – is drastically minimized. The best practices used in the pre-Autotune, pre-digital editing era ought to be the gold standard when it comes to studio recording: prepare thoroughly, get incredible takes, and have most of your editing already complete before the musicians are walking out the studio door. It’s great to have a bag of post production tricks, but ideally, particularly with orchestral music, I shouldn’t need to use them.
Budget Time Just Like You Budget Money…Have a Buffer. Everything took longer than I anticipated! Finding players (then finding new players when the inevitable conflict or flat tire or *insert unexpected situation here* arose) took time, and then I had to get everybody into the studio at the same date and time. Then, once I had the recordings, I needed follow up sessions to do overdubs. That doesn’t even count the time to edit and mix. Maybe I’ll learn the secret of totally predictive accuracy someday, but for now, I’m buffering my time.
Be organized, because someday, someone will want a project from ten years back. It’s a continual battle, but building a consistent approach to everything is absolutely necessary, from my Pro Tools session layouts to how I gather and organize session musicians, to how I organize hard drive space, my calendar events, my contact lists, my email…etc. I’ve created problems for myself, and later solved them, simply by being more mindful about organization. I’ve also realized the need for maintaining a basic database; a spreadsheet that references where I save sessions and related data, both on the internal hard drive of my computer, and on external drives.
In learning to be organized, I’ve slowly begun to realize the value of taking time to ask myself what steps to take, in the moment, to be sure I can retrace those steps later on.
Be Thankful. Oh, what a great lesson to hold close to my heart. 🙂 It’s a bad day when I forget to say thank you, to God and to everyone in my life. Thank you, TSU! Thank you Gary! Thank you Mark! Thank you Michele, Billy, and Chris! Thank you, lovely musicians in training and musicians long established, both! I love you guys!