A couple of years ago, my friend Silas Stewart recorded an EP of classical music featuring percussion. He wrote one of the pieces, I wrote two, and he performed on everything with a slew of friends. One of the engineers for that session recently asked if he could sample one of my pieces, Evocations for alto saxophone and percussion, for a track by his hip-hop group Lamarr Family Values. I'm pretty stoked about how it turned out! Check it out.
The other day, I was giving a lesson on writing music to picture, and I came across an analogy that I thought illustrated well the way that I approach scoring games & films.
Lately I've been listening to ungodly amounts of synthwave. It's not something I expected to get really, really into, but now that I'm here in the midst of this obsession, I can start to trace where this all came from and why I'm digging it so much.
As a composer (and, I’m sure, in any creative endeavor), it’s extremely, deceptively easy to fall into a rhythm and habit and just write without thinking too much about it. We simply write what we think sounds like it should come next in that moment alone; where the melody “wants” to go. Often, this leads to a very natural, effortless style of music that flows out of the composer as if it just had to.
Inspired by Junkie XL’s intriguing video series on his studio and film work (especially on Mad Max: Fury Road), I decided to make some custom instruments using Native Instruments’ excellent industry-standard sampler Kontakt (don’t buy it at full price; it and Komplete go on sale at least once a year) and some drums I had access to; so far, one small bass drum at the nearby university, and one small bass drum at home that I got for free a few years back.
Participation in music can sometimes get kind of a bad rap. My tendency is to associate it with somewhat patronizing practice of having the audience clap along or do some kind of call-and-response thing, which in practice usually only goes to show how little said audience remembers from the meager music education many of them probably had.
I write music. Some of it is more electronic, some of it is written for instruments, much of it is a combination of the two. Some of it is light-hearted and off-kilter, some of it dark and immersive. It kinda runs the gamut, for better or worse.
