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
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
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
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
How to create realistic orchestral programming using Note Length & Velocity For part IV of my Intro to Orchestral Sample Libraries series, we’ll be talking about how to create realistic orchestral programming using note length and velocity. These two parameters in particular, “velocity and note lengths,” don’t appear to be discussed as much in other orchestral programming lessons (at least I never hear it coming up much.) I’m not sure why
It’s time for Intro to Orchestral Sample Libraries, Part III: String Articulations. When I first started learning about Orchestral Sample Libraries, I kept hearing about these things called “articulations” and, while I had a general idea of what they were, I found myself always stumbling over the meaning of each; this often made it difficult for me to know the best way to use them. While I did study classical music theory
I had a blast creating my piece, “Spark” for the #OutsideCompetition. Big thanks to Orchestral Tools and StaffPad for creating such a great opportunity for us all. Although I didn’t win the competition, Orchestral Tools still gave all who participated a free instrument from their Tableau Solo Strings series – how awesome is that? I chose the solo viola. It’s downloading now, so I’ll be back with a review shortly! Thanks again Orchestral
Now it’s time for Part 2 of my Intro to Orchestral Sample Libraries for Beginners series. In part 1, I talked about the difference between a sample library that is recorded Wet (including the sound of the room) vs a sample library recorded dry (no room sound.) In this post, I’ll be discussing the difference ensembles and sections. As a reminder, these Intro series post are intended for beginners: those
Orchestral sample libraries for the beginner | Part I: Wet vs Dry. This will be my first in a series of posts where I share some of the key concepts that I use when composing and producing orchestral-based music using orchestral sample libraries. Please note: This series is orchestral sample libraries for the beginner. If you are just getting started, and you’re interested in learning more about how to compose orchestral