Music I Composed for ABC’s TV Series The Con

I was very fortunate to be able to contribute some music for the new season of “The Con,” on ABC. The Con is a true crime television series produced by ABC News and narrated by Whoopi Goldberg. For this season, they wanted to feature more natural, organic-sounding piano and strings (eg cello, violin) music. This is some of my favorite type of music to compose, so I had a wonderful time

Writing Music for TV, Film, Media Best Practices Part 1: Emotion

In part one of my new series, Writing Music for TV, Film, Media Best Practices, I will focus on the importance of establishing a clear emotion in your music. Serve the Visual: the role of Music in TV, Film, Media One phrase that I will likely repeat often throughout this series is: Serve the Visual. What does this mean? When talking about making any type of music for the visual

How to Write for Percussion Part II: Note Values, Tempo, Quantization

For this next post in my “Writing for Percussion” series, we’re going way back to music basics to get a foundation for how to read — and how to count  — rhythms. We’ll do this by understanding beats, bars, note values and tempo. And, because we are generally focused on modern digital production concepts, we’ll relate these musical foundations to things like controlling tempo and MIDI quantization within our Digital Audio

How to Write for Percussion Part I: Frequency Ranges

In this post, I’ll be discussing how to write for percussion by first understanding the instrument frequency ranges. This will be part one of a multi-part set of posts on using Rhythm and Percussion in Orchestral-based sample library compositions and productions. Today, I start with PART ONE: to understand the family of orchestral percussion instruments and their respective frequency ranges — from low to high — and how best to

Intro to Orchestral Sample Libraries | Part VIII: How to Use Reverb pt2

In our first post about reverb, we covered the basics: what is reverb, the different kinds of digital reverbs and their various features, and how to use reverb in a musical production. In this new post, we will pick things up from there, and take a deeper look into the use of reverb for more complex mixing concepts such as depth and placement within a three dimensional (3D) space. Our

Intro to Orchestral Sample Libraries | Part VII: How to Use Reverb

In this post I’ll talk about how to use reverb with orchestral sample libraries. Many years ago, when I first began my music production journey, I initially thought of reverb as just another “effect”and so I lumped it in with my other sound tools: delay, flanger, chorus, phaser, distortion, etc. In those early days, I was primarily recording small bands where I would use reverb mostly on the vocal overdubs

Unboxing and Setting Up the TEGELER AUDIO CRÈME RC

Unboxing and Setting Up the TEGELER AUDIO CRÈME RC I finally bought a new piece of hardware and now it’s time for the TEGELER AUDIO CRÈME RC unboxing and set it up! Yes, I’m talking about a physical device that I can touch and move the knobs, not another plugin that lives inside my DAW. It’s crazy to think that this is the first piece of hardware I’ve purchased in

Rocket Charger! Music Video

I recently did a quick music video for one of my hybrid trailer tracks, Rocket Charger. I plan to do a separate walk-through video on the mastering of this piece (I used my new Tegeler Creme RC during the mastering phase!) Keep a look out for that post/video and in the meantime, please check out the video below. Woo!

Intro to Orchestral Sample Libraries | Part VI: Layering Samples

Now it’s time to discuss another approach for creating more realistic-sounding orchestral productions using sample libraries: Layering Samples. By “layering” I am referring to using multiple samples at the same time to achieve a certain sound. What’s important to first understand is the WHY? Why would would you want to do this? With so many high quality, full-featured orchestral sample libraries to choose from, certainly there is one that cover