Recent recordings and doings

I've written and recorded a couple of tracks since early May. The first is for Illumina-- the game maker wanted something in the vein of Halo for a soundtrack, so I wrote (stole) a Carmina Burana type of choral part with some percussion and orchestra and he was happy. I didn't finish it in time for E3, but the game is still pre-beta release and there's no actual trailer to set music to, so hopefully the track will be put to good use later.

Rob Child is editing Antietam: The Boys in Blue and Gray and I'm busy writing and recording for it. The documentary is a bit different from the first film in this series in that he's aiming less for the epic film feel (though there is a little of that in the reenactment footage) and more for the excellent storytelling of historians to keep us engaged. I have written the beginning, the ending, and am working over the theme music he licensed from Steve Heitzeg. This theme music is a beautiful, elegaic piece for strings only. I hope I can successfully negotiate the middle ground between what Rob needs for the film and what the piece actually is!

Good news from Rob, I hope, will be forthcoming early in the week. He has an important meeting with a source of funding for his projects. If he gets work, I get more work!

A publisher called Masterworks Press will be sending me a nice royalty check this summer. The editor has a new project for me-- a series of pieces based on the idea of the "Geographical Fugue": set words to rhythms for learning purposes. This should be fun.

I had a jolt from the IRS on Friday. They sent me a CP2000 which basically says I didn't report all the income that was reported to them by my employers. I found the problem: it turns out that a payroll company made a mistake and sent out a large number of extra W2s to the IRS. My "extra" income was $10018 with $2770 in taxes due. Yikes! The church business manager (I am a church musician by night and weekend) had the needed documentation to fax to the IRS explaining the problem, but I wished he would have warned us all that this was coming. Ah well. You should know that I am scrupulously honest about taxes-- I report income from weddings and other miscellaneous services even though it would be very easy to hide. (Why is cheating the IRS a virtue, I wonder?) Anyway, when I first saw the notice and thought they were going to extract even more from me, I was feeling kind of stupid-- what was honesty getting me if I was getting slammed for even more? Hopefully it all will resolve quietly.

My New Electric Guitar

Since I don't have a real studio [someday, someday] I record everything inside my computer. Thus, I rely on sampled instruments of all kinds. Mostly, I have orchestral instruments, but I've begun collecting others recently from vr_sound such as world percussion instruments [currently in love with the djembe] and most recently, a "med_dist_elec_guitar". I had a pleasant surprise with these last night.

I'm working on a little music for an indie game called Illumina. They wanted Halo-like music for their Halo-like game and so I stole the idea of using an old style of music (Halo uses plainsong or chant) and blending other stuff with it, like a wailing guitar and a rock beat. The first part was easy: I've written plenty of choral Classical music and so I dashed off some 18th-century style church music and sent it to the game maker. He liked it but wanted something more aggressive, too. I knew the day was coming that I would need to write something that sounded like rock music so I finally went to work to blend the 18th century with the late 20th. I thought my Roland 1080 (a nice machine with plenty of the basics) would have what I needed, assuming it was built more for pop music than anything else, but I was wrong. The guitars were almost all synthesized rather than sampled and I couldn't get an expressive lick out of them. So, I went to vr sound and found a few guitars, bought one and proceeded to other projects while I waited for the disk to arrive. When it did, I loaded it and started to fool around, wondering if I could actually write something that could pass for rock. The guitar really sounded great, which helped of course, but when I started playing some soulful licks against the melancholy 18th cent. church chorus, the strange and beautiful expressivity of electric guitar started spinning out of the speakers [it sounds a little like Albinoni planted in the 1980s]. I added a beat[looped, very simple and unfinished] and cranked up the guitar an octave toward the end and the whole thing turned convincingly from sadness to aggression. It fits the premise of the game and I'm hoping the game producer likes it and agrees. I'm such an unagressive person-- what do I know?

I'm a little afraid of playing the track this morning. What if it stinks?