At least, that's what I think will happen once your hear this song.
Michael Stromenger's forthcoming murder-mystery web series Curtain Call, includes music and score written by Ben Larson and myself.
The first release from this project is the single from the pilot episode titled "Cassie's Song". The quote that Ben wrote up for CDBaby:
Haley Boyd sings a powerful rock ballad from the pilot episode of the web-series Curtain Call. Boyd plays the part of Cassie Sterling, a stage singer who is mysteriously gunned down in the middle of a performance. From the creators of Maelstrom - The Zombie Opera comes a blend of moody piano stylings, sweeping filmscore strings, a pinch of broadway panache, and the irresistible drive of rock guitars.
This will be the first pop song that I've released for public consumption, and I must say, I'm very proud of the job we've done. The tune is really catchy, and the music pretty much just rocks (I'm not usually so conceited, but I feel good about this song!) I know for a fact that there's been many times where my wife gets a little crazy because she gets the tune stuck in her head.
So now that we've written and finally released this song, it's now up to you to consume and comment. If you feel okay with parting from one of your hard earned dollars, then head on over to cdbaby, iTunes, or Amazon to purchase this single. If you end up liking it, I would appreciate you leaving feedback on whatever site you bought it from.
This was also the first thing that we worked on, with Ben setting the lyrics that Mike wrote. After the initial song was done being written, I went back through and orchestrated it, and also, added the drums and guitar. The whole song project was done in Logic Studio.
The show is set for release on March 9th, so stay tuned for even more music!
Remember how I had a hurt back?
Well, it turns out that I had a herniated disc. So this Wednesday, I'll be going under the knife to have the herniation and some parts of spine bone removed.
So if you have the time on Wednesday, send some good vibes my way.
Thank you in advance.
In other news,, in the coming weeks, I'll be transitioning the blog to a new URL. You don't have to worry quite yet because I'll be forwarding the current URL to the new one, but I'm not sure as to how it'll effect your RSS feeds (if that's how you read this), because you'll have to subscribe to the new feed.
The new blog will be at reedreimer.com/blog and I'll be tinkering with the layout. So please don't get too freaked out (the three of you that read this).
Also, any feedback on this stuff is welcome. Do you hate the new blog? Did you get upset because I changed your RSS Feed? Do you hate me in general?
Anyways... much love!
bestadultscore
A little gift for those of you checking out the new site...
I recently had the opportunity to work with my good friend and studio partner, Ben Larson, writing music for an original video that was shown at the US Justice Conference in Bend, OR.
Here is the music we wrote for the video.
And here is the video:
Ben and I had a great time creating the music for this, even though we wrote it pretty much in its entirety in one day (15 hours in a row).
For more photos from the set go here.
I love the selection of Root Beer!
(Okay, so not all of those are root beer, but they were all good.)
I missed the performance of the national anthem prior to the super bowl today, but when I started seeing facebook posts about how Christina messed up the words, it didn't take long before I was all caught up. In case you missed it:
First of all I should preface the following by writing that this is my opinion. Also, I do appreciate popular music and certain trends in the genre.
Upon watching the video it wasn't too hard to figure out that she had messed up some of the lyrics. You know what? That kind of stuff happens a lot, and I didn't care that much because she was professional enough to maintain and continue.
However, I felt the performance was not very good. I understand that many people really like Aguilera's work and her performance style, and that's okay. But I feel that they way she applied it to the national anthem was pretty indulgent.
I don't know how you feel, but when I'm at a sporting event, I like to sing along with our national anthem. I feel like it bonds the people in the community (bleachers/stands) and it makes me feel just a little patriotic. And when compared with some other countries, sometimes I feel like we don't sing it together enough.
When Aguilera sang it, there would have been no way I could sing along because of all the runs, and trills and pop techniques she applied. It felt like a disservice to the meaning of the song, and more of a testament to how many more notes she could sing in one breath.
It's my humble opinion that when it comes to the national anthem, simpler is better.
2010 wasn't a huge year for new score releases, but there were definitely a few that I absolutely adore! Now that I've had time to think about it, I've put together my favorites.
So without further explanation, and in alphabetical order, here are my favorite scores from 2011:
Ghost Writer - Alexandre Desplat
Desplat has some great orchestration chops, and for me, Ghost writer was his best score this year. Don't get me wrong, I loved Harry Potter, and The King's Speech... but this score bears multiple listens. Music On Film compared this score to something Bernard Herrmann would have done for Hitchcock, which only makes me like it more!
Favorite cue: "Chase on the Ferry"
How to Train Your Dragon - John Powell
The most Williams-like of my top scores from 2011, this score continues the expansion of John Powell's dominance over my heart. A good movie, this score kicks major ass. A fully orchestral, bombastic accompaniment for a Viking boy who befriends a dragon. Is it just me, or does Powell have, perhaps, the most distinct voice for being an alumnus of Zimmer's school of composition, Remote Control Studios?
Favorite cue: "Dragon's Den"
Inception - Hans Zimmer
This score really surprised me at how cool it was. A beautiful blend of synth and orchestra (minus woodwinds), and built on a beautiful progression, the score makes for great repeat listening. Written to represent dreams and dreamscapes, Zimmer provides a very haunting score, with some very clever musical transformations including getting the big brass stabbing motif from a slowed down version of a song performed by Edith Piaf.
Favorite cue: "Dream is Collapsing"
Predators - John Debney
I know the controversy surrounding Debney's homage score. Using the same theme's and orchestration style as Alan Silvestri on his efforts for Predator, and Predator 2, he took a lot of heat, and some people were not happy that Silvestri didn't receive a credit. Despite all that, I love this score. It sounds very pristine, and I was happy that it was such a huge homage!
Favorite cue: "Free Fall"
Tron: Legacy - Daft Punk (Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, Thomas Bangalter)
I've written about my feelings on this score already, and I still like it a lot. Even with the comparisons to Zimmer and Howard's Dark Knight, I still love this score, and it is still inspiring me for the "next big project (in my head)".
Favorite cue: "Rinzler"
Honorable mention:
The re-recording of Basil Poledouris' Conan the Barbarian.
The only reason this isn't in the top five may be pretty obvious... it is not from a movie released in 2010. It is a re-recording of a movie from 1982. But I have to say that this score really rocks my face off!
Favorite cue: The Tree of Woe / Recovery
Fringe - Michael Giacchino, Chris Tilton, Chad Seiter
One of my favorite shows on television, the score is also super awesome. These composers are super at creating interesting sounds and timbres to fit the Fringe universe... er, universes!
Favorite cue: "Gurney For Your Thoughts" (Tilton)
Human Target - Bear McCreary
Bear has been doing a lot of work lately, whether it was finishing up BSG, Terminator: Chronicles of Sarah Connor, Caprica, The Walking Dead, and now The Cape. Human Target is epic for one reason... in this day and age when it's much easier, cheaper, and time saving to use synth and sample scores, this dude was composing for a full orchestra for this show every week. Very admirable, and something I can only hope to do in the future.
Favorite cue: Honestly, it's too hard to choose from the nearly 3 1/2 hours of music that was released on the CD!
I am now a certified Bachelor of Music in Composition... so I'll take all those composition jobs now, thank you!
You may also notice that whilst earning this degree I did so with great flair as noted by the "summa cum laude".
Good times!
My friend and studio partner Ben L. and I made the trek down to Anaheim, CA for the winter NAMM show, and i have to say that it was a blast!
We saw many cool things, but were absolutely blown away by Electro Harmonix's pedal: V256. Seriously... there was a tiny woman demoing the pedal, and when she activated it, she went from sounding like a small woman to a 6'7" tough guy. There were other effects on the pedal that have put it high up on my list of "things I want for the studio."
I also got to play around with the Moog guitar, and I love it. The infinite sustain (perpetuated by internal magnets) make this a very special guitar. Although it is also on the list, it'll most likely remain there for a while as it is pretty expensive. I also got to play with the Minimoog Voyager. So awesome! I need to start selling some blood because this thing comes in at $4995... but worth it... right? Yes!
Out of everything at the show, the thing that I ordered right away was the Logic Pro cover from KB Covers. It is a plastic cover for your computer keyboard that has all of the shortcuts and macros for the Pro Audio software Logic, or many others. If you are interested in one of these, they have a show discount for 20% off through 1/23. Promo Code: CES2011
While we were down in Anaheim we popped on over to Disney Land and California Adventure (don't worry... I didn't go on more than a couple rides because of my back). Here you can see Ben and I blasting some "astros". I wasn't very good.
Now that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have won the Golden Globe for Best Original Film Score, I thought I should try to explore my thoughts about Trent Reznor and Film music.
I read the other day that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have been asked to score the US remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
SIDEBAR - This is not a post about whether or not a remake should be made at all, only a couple years after the original foreign film was released (2009). Nor is this a review about Jacob Groth's effort on that film.
The first thought I had about the news of Reznor and Atticus was that I wouldn't like their score for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and that maybe Trent should stick with writing his Nine Inch Nails music in his electronica/pop genre, because, in my opinion... he has created a lot of music that I love and have listened to for years!
After, thinking about it, I'm wondering to myself why I have contempt prior to investigation.
I'm still deep in consideration, but here's what I know right now...
Out of all the scores that I've purchased this year, The Social Network is the only one that is almost entirely electronic.
When I first heard who was scoring The Social Network, I was looking forward to hearing it! I knew that Reznor could do many things musical. Combine that with the guy who wrote the very cool score for The Book of Eli, and I don't really see how it could be bad.
Finally I heard it.
The Social Network was a great underscore for the on screen manifestation of Aaron Sorkin's screenplay. I write underscore because, to be honest with you, aside from the electronic version of "In the Hall of the Mountain King", it isn't really all that memorable to me besides being Reznor's first foray into film scoring. And while it was different sounding compared to film scores released around the same time, it isn't a stretch from what I was hoping Reznor could do. And in thinking of things that he's already done like The Downward Spiral, The Social Network just seems like B-side Reznor noodleing. Harsh, but that's how I feel.
If I had to guess, it sounds like Atticus deferred to Reznor. I can hear elements of him buried at sporadic intervals throughout the score, but overall... it feels like Reznor to me.
With all that said, I should also write that their first joint effort does not a voice make. (God that sounds pretentious). I guess I hope that when they do team up again for their next effort, I want them to flex their musical muscles, and blow me away like I know they can.
Okay, the title may have been a little overstated, but i totally did break something in my back. According to those who know and understand these things, i ruptured my L4 disk in my spine.
I can tell you without lying that it hurts, a lot, even though this happened all the way back in October. In the MRI picture, you can see the damaged disk; it's the second from the bottom, and its obscuring the (white) nerve cluster.
So if you're thinking about lifting something heavy, and perhaps heavier than you should lift, consider lifting with your knees and not your back.
This has been your public service announcement for the week (it's mine for life).
Do you want to know what my new year's resolution was?
It was to not do a whole heck of a lot for the first week of 2011, and guess what... I succeeded.
I may have cheated a little bit by having celebrated Christmas a week late with my in-laws. But I'll take it as a win.
So now 2011 can begin, and boy what a year it's going to be (for better or worse).
Among growing my own wings, there's so much in store that I'm not going to write about it (I'm not one for tempting fate).
So if you please, stay tuned and I'll let you know about stuff as it happens.
So enjoy pics of my nephews!
Talk to you next week.
Congratulations to my sister and brother-in-law for making me a new nephew.
Mother and Baby are well!
The end of 2010 is quickly arriving.
Here's what I'll be ending my year with:
- Listening to some Daft Punk Tron Legacy magic.
- Reading the Dies the Fire series by SM Sterling
- Writing a violin solo for my friend Stella
- Beginning work on music for the Murder-Mystery web series Curtain Call by Michael Stromenger
- Catching up on Dexter and Boardwalk Empire
- Playing with new software called Melodyne (this thing is a beast!)
- Taking the Arkansas Contractors Business and Law test (for my other job)
- Shipping a bunch of gifts for the Christmas Holiday.
- Playing Crackdown 2 finally (I've heard it's not that good, but I don't mind, I can always just replay Halo Reach)
That's a lot to do in 2 weeks, but I think I can handle it.
TronSoundtrack.com 34.98 Deluxe Edition
Amazon.com 11.88 Disc
iTunes 9.99 Digital
At first when I heard that Daft Punk was going to be creating the music for the new Tron film... I felt let down a little. Actually I felt let down a lot.
The original film Tron was one of those movies, as a kid, that I was constantly re-watching and really wishing that I had a light cycle. When it was announced that they were creating a sequel that was finally more than a thought, I was excited for it, but I couldn't understand the choice of composers.
Don't think that I dislike Daft Punk, because I actually like them quite a bit. It's just that their brand of music up until now seemed too... happy.
To me the world that Tron inhabits is very dark, very expansive, and very, very sinister (I mean... I guess one could call it a cyberscape). It didn't seem to me that Daft Punk would be appropriate for this world (unless they were taking the film in a completely different direction from the first, but that wasn't what I was seeing in the trailers). In my mind I couldn't figure out how the film could possibly be good with two hours of "Around the World" underscoring the solar sailers, disk fights, and the other crazy shit, you thought I was going to forget the light cycles, didn't you?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9MszVE7aR4]
And then Daft released some samples from the score. It was not what I was expecting to say the least. It was as if the French DJ duo had taken a bunch of downers but remained like hyper-bots throwing their electronic instruments into minor keys and reading up on how to orchestrate for strings.
A friend of mine, Herr Vogler, commented that it sounded as if "someone had their Dark Knighty o's" referring to how similar the sound of Daft was to that of the string writing from Hans Zimmer's (and James Newton Howard's) Dark Knight score. I had to agree that the sound was indeed very similar. Another similarity can be heard by some of the brass stings they used, which sounds very close to another Zimmer score released this year... Inception.
When I heard the full score, I was able to hear the brilliant marriage between Daft Punk's electronic synthesis and acoustic orchestral instruments.
The cue "Overture" starts off the score. Taking a little while to build up with a dark pad, and introducing the theme slowly in the horn section, it really feels expansive. At about a minute and a half in the synths can really be heard joining the huge sweeping orchestra, putting a nice exclamation point on the opener.
In a lot of the cues, the synths are quite obvious, but blend supremely well with the orchestra. In "The Son of Flynn" Daft begins with an arpeggiated synth figure that reminds me of something Muse would do before breaking out into some rock riffs.
One of my favorite cues is "Outlands". It has a very quick sounding figure in the strings that is expanded into more string sections throughout the piece. Eventually the brass joins in and helps the cue build to its climactic ending. Very cool string writing!
"Adagio for Tron" may be the closest cue to something resembling complete orchestral knowhow, Even with the synth figures entwined in the terrific writing, I still find it very organic. And how can you not love a piece that also includes organ? Ending with a cello solo, this piece is also one of my favorites!
Even though I had been disappointed about the potential to have an electronic Daft Punk score for Tron, I almost couldn't believe my own delight at a couple of the floor ready house electronic cues included in the score, namely "End of Line" and their early single "Derezzed." The only difference between these cues and classic Daft Punk is the fact that they were written for a movie. So awesome. They get my heart pumping and my feet tapping. Makes me very excited to which images they match up with in the film!
For as much as I dreaded this score, I would call this not just a pleasant surprise, but a most welcome guest in my collection, and a definite addition to my favorite scores of 2010. I would also be remiss if I didn't write that this score is inspiring some truly grand ideas in my little human brain... but more on that at a future date!
So Ben L. and I participated in this years National Novel Writing Month, and I thought I'd share that we completed the challenge!
Without going into detail about the different ways in which we broke rules (you're not supposed to write with a partner, etc...) we probably spent between 20-25 days total on the project.
You may ask "Were all of those days in November?"
My question to you is... can I include the parallel universes that are on different calanders?
Anyways, we did it. We collated all of our words last night and came up with a little over 51,000. The neat thing about that is... we still have about a third of our story left to write (I never thought I'd write that much... ever.)
You may wonder when you get to read it. Well, let us finish it first... and then let us edit it as well. How long do those things take? I dunno, I've never done this before.
The tentative title of our book: Meta Pneuma - The Search for the Necronomicon
It's totally steampunk!
In honor of the thanksgiving holiday, and the fact that this is my 101st post on the wordpress blog, I'll keep it short and sweet.
Happy Thanksgiving
I've always been a sucker for movies that are set in space, or have an element of space or spacey things in them. Having said that, it's probably no surprise to you that I really love sci-fi movies.
Some of my favorites are The Fifth Element, District 9, Sunshine, Star Wars, Event Horizon, Independence Day, Avatar, WALL-E, Star Trek, Moon, Pitch Black, Deep Impact, Apollo 13, Contact, Aliens, Serenity, Firefly (I know this isn't a movie... but it's pretty damn brilliant!), etc...
You can see from this list that some of these would never make a "best of" list in a lot of people's opinions. However, despite the negative points, I like these things because there are space based things... or aliens.
So with that, I finally watched the trailer for Battle: Los Angeles. It looks pretty awesome, and it has one of my current favorite actors Aaron Eckhart. It also has Michelle Rodriguez, and Bridget Moynahan. With a $100 million budget and a director hailing from Johannesburg, South Africa (Jonathan Liebesman), I have high hopes for this movie. I'm not expecting District 9, but I hope at least it'll be better than a Roland Emmerich alien invasion film circa 2010.
Another film that is out right now is Skyline, which looks like it'd be right up my alley, but I've decided to hold off until it hits Netflix based on Ain't It Cool News' reviews.
One funny thing I found out while looking up info on B:LA was that Sony contemplated suing the Strause brothers over Skyline based on the fact that they may have used some of Sony's resources while working on B:LA to finish their own film.
With this knowledge, is there an alien or space film you recommend I see?
A friend of mine recently sent me a recording of a live solo violin performance, and asked me why it didn't sound very good. The problem, he stated, was that the sound was very flat and sounded compressed, not like previous recordings in the same hall with the same recording equipment.
I was excited, not only to help a brother out, but because I actually learned about ways to measure this particular problem in one of the classes I took at PSU... finally, tuition is paying off... sort of.
I knew, that I would need to use a frequency or spectrum analyzer to see visually, what we could hear aurally. The program I used is a free download called Spectro. And can be used as a plug-in within your Digital Audio Workstation of choice... even garageband.
Each Example sample is also pictured with the corresponding spectrum analysis.
Example #1 (compressed):
stats:
- Bit Rate - 192 kbps
- Sample Rate - 32.000kHz
Example #2 (non-compressed... er, technically, less-compressed):
stats:
- Bit Rate - 256 kbps
- Sample Rate - 44.100 kHz
You'll see in each of the spectral analyses that the partials reached are very representative of the sound. The first example barely reaches 3,900 Hz, while the second example reaches as high as 22,000 Hz.
I also think that you'll be able to hear the difference in sound as you listen. Example #1 sounds very flat, and almost as if it's low fidelity. While the second example sounds more "live in the room", and much richer.
My friend and I are agreed that the loss of fidelity most likely occurred during the initial bounce when the transfer was made from the original disc to mp3.
You can see from this comparison picture that the lower the bitrate, the less dynamic of a range that will remain in the acoustic envelope of sound... basically you're losing a good portion of the overtones, which is definitely part of the music (even though you may not even notice it).
Ideally, you would want a Lossless rip, or for most types of music, 320 kbps... minimum 256 kbps. Anything less and you start losing a lot of sounds, or at least the sounds that help make up the music you're supposed to be listening to.
So now, with this information, you can see why it's important to use greater bit rates when ripping your new Mastodon CD, or downloading a copy of the soundtrack from Beauty and the Beast from your favorite online music store.
