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Viewing posts for the category music-tech

Having just finished week one of a two week production of Shout! (last week in The Paget Rooms, Penarth, this week in the Borough Theatre, Abergavenny), I wanted to talk a little about some of my background workings as a Musical Director. While during show week my job comprises of running vocal warmups, leading the band from the keyboard and trying to cue things correctly, there’s a lot of work that gets us to that point. In a show as vocally rich as Shout!, a production where we’re using nine singers to cover five lines of vocal parts, I wanted to share how I went about making personalised rehearsal recordings for each member of the cast, using Google Sheets, Dorico, Cubase, DaVinci Resolve and YouTube.

As a classically-trained composer I’ll always have a special place in my heart for the orchestral sounds and instruments I spent years studying. Since I increasingly work in a digital space, it’s important for me to be able to find the instruments I’m looking for. In my present workflow the majority of my software instruments are hosted within Native Instrument’s Kontakt, a beast in the world of samplers. However, I’ve been running into problems with actually finding the instruments I’m looking for, specifically percussion.

In celebration of Mandagon’s first birthday, I realised that I had never finished my blog series on the sound design of the game! While it’s been over a year since I built the sounds, I’ve collected a few of my favourites and shared a few words about them!

With news of Soundcloud's *possible* incoming demise the general recommendation is to download copies of your Soundcloud hosted material as soon as possible. This of course is based around a worst-case scenario when there's just an 'off-switch' moment for the site, which feels unlikely but could happen.

For the past few months I've been wanting to create more visual content to give the music a different canvas; being very fond of film/video game scoring has left me with a want for supporting material! To that end I'm going to be trying out making spectrogram visuals for a number of my tracks, the first being for Pixel.