Award Sounds Music, Photography and Consultancy

I've recently received the video for the 1st episode of Venn (the previous release was a pilot and called Episode 0)

Again the episode is by Spinneyhead Presents. Episode 1 picks up from that and plays on the theme of the celibacy bet. The content is better than Episode 0, the scripts are better and from my perspective, the audio is so much better. It's definitely better than the first series, Memory.  read more »

I've talked about tremolo as a musical feature before, this time I want to go into more detail.

First things first, let's sort out the guitarists: I don't mean using the tremolo arm/whammy bar or whatever you want to call it ("handle" as my girlfriend called it - and no she won't be picking up my guitars for a while). The whammy bar creates a vibrato feature, not a tremolo. Vibrato alters pitch.

Amplitude  read more »

13. Meet Other people

13a avoid being recluse

Composing music can be a solitary activity. For some that works, for others it can be a lonely experience. Whatever the perspective, it can quickly turn into isolation. Collaborating with others reduces the isolation.

13b friends

I've met most of my best friends through music and music-related activities. Some of the people I met as acquaintances have turned into good friends over time.  read more »

7. Finances

Even arranging a loan with your bank manager is a form of collaboration. Ok, it's a purchase of a product by you from them, but if responsible, then the bank should be acting in partnership with you. I'm working on a few projects where I can see finances becoming an issue in the medium term. I could also see a few of the project members funding their own areas. None could fund the whole project, but as each could fund their own area, the project could still work. It's like pooling resources but more controlled.

8. Opportunities  read more »

4. Production

4a Fresh Pair of Ears

A producer should remain distant enough from the in-depth recording process to be able to bring a fresh opinion. Their view can suggest new directions or, at least, a validation of the current direction.

4b Motivation  read more »

A short series of articles on collaborating with other people to make your music better, make it heard or to help them move their music forwards.

 

1. Recording

1a Engineer  read more »

Order

Have you thought about how you compose? Not which chords, but the order in which you approach composing?

My experience

I use a few different workflows, depending on what I'm aiming to produce. I change my approach if there's a video to sync to or if I need to incorporate other musicians and so on. I'm not saying that any one of the approaches is the correct approach for everyone, but I do what works for me.

Write first or play first  read more »

Music Thing has just released the first 25 of the music making tips from the site's readership.

My suggestion's in there. Care to guess which?

Recent Upgrade

I've just upgraded from Logic Pro 7.2 to Logic 8 in the last couple of days. And I'm more impressed than I thought I would be. It's odd, if you read the various support pages and sites, there appear to be a lot of problems, but I hardly found any issues. This is how far I got without reading the manual:  read more »

I mentioned featuring multiple rhythms in the previous article on Musical Creativity. In this one, I'll introduce multiple speeds.

Different Speed
Similar to how different beats are accentuated due to the accents of the individual time signatures in the previous article, we can see a similar effect with varying the speed of one or more of the tracks.

To demonstrate, I'll take you through a basic sample song. Here's a screenshot of the song.
 read more »