The Glassman

Well, I guess this is becoming a bi-weekly thing, but then again, there's a lot going on. Most recently, I've rekindled my love of Philip Glass. I started listening to his 2007 album, Monsters of Grace. When I took advanced music composition last year I tried writing something like this, but failed miserably. I think there is such a fine line between what he does and pop writing...I guess I was too pop oriented. Anyways, that has definitely been my music of choice as of late. Curious to see if this affects any of my writing/projects. We'll see.

As per projects, I'm starting to feel some time crunch as I focus on my last semester of classes and work. Nevertheless, I've not so much changed, but adjusted some of my focus to Jingle writing. I recently wrote and recorded the Comanche Cucumber commercial and ended up writing an arguably hilarious and catchy jingle. Seeing as I'd written jingles/theme songs for all of my radio shows, I thought I'd keep it up, see what would happen. Yesterday I thought of two more jingles, one for a real product and another fake one. I've done some research and am looking to do a lot more. I've contacted the station manager of WSUW on campus to see if any specialty shows want jingle and things like that. I'm pretty pumped to keep this up.

Progress is also being made on the writing for the LEGO movie, had some more ideas for the opening and it's turning out pretty good. Found out how to get the movie into Logic so I can compose along while watching it for cues and the like. Logic is definitely different than any other DAW I've used, but I know need to familiarize myself with it. 

Still need to record a lot of voice work for a few projects, but I'll have time saturday to do it, so I should be able to meet my goal of getting the Delinquents with Combs sketch completely record, and all the commercials as well.

I've been feeling the pressure of finding a job, especially with may graduation looming. Sometimes I wish I was better at something that wasn't so selective and such a small market. Nevertheless, I'm going to keep on with what I'm doing. I've sent out some e-mails to various contacts and hope to gain more contacts from them at the very least. Tom Petty was right, the waiting is the hardest part.

Yet...still excited.

I want to make a supersonic man out of you...don't stop me now

So things have kept up with my expectations so far. I've been waiting for my next spoken word album from my brother so I can keep that going, but I know he's busy with other projects of his own, however, I'm really anxious to keep doing those, it was a lot of fun. 

I found an interesting video on archive.org that I'm planning on putting music to. I downloaded and have started brainstorming ideas for music...and possibly fx, not sure if I want to do that, but I most likely will. It's a 3 minute LEGO movie, I guess people call them brick films these days, stop motion legos. I put music to another brick film for MIDI techniques 2 years ago and that worked out really well. I plan on getting most of the different themes and the bulk of the prep work done by this time next week.

I also had the idea to make a short skit, possibly for the podcast, based on the package of a comb that looks and works like a switchblade. The package uses lines like "they were out for kicks" and "you can have the dame, just gimme back my comb!"  There are at least 5 of these on there, along with a title of "Delinquents with Combs." It practically writes itself. And it basically did. I wrote the skit in about an hour in the style of an old radio serial like the Shadow. It should be pretty funny when I record the voices. I came up with some organ music for the opening and closing narrations tonight and recorded a scratch narration to see if it would fit. It works great and I can't wait to get home tonite and start recording the rest. Hopefully I can manipulate my voice enough where it doesn't totally sound like I'm doing all of the voices, but then again, that could be hilarious. 

I also want to finish my mock commercial for "Comanche's Cucumbers" done this week. It's a short one, should only be about 30 seconds. But just like the radio skit, I just need to record the voices at home or at work and I can do the rest from this snazzy macbook. 

I'm taking a creative writing class and this is also helping with the creative flow. Despite the teacher being rather hippie-like and loving everything anyone says, it is still proving to help me find my "voice" in that realm as well. 

I'm getting my band, The King's Gentlemen, back together after a short hiatus due to my busyness with the recording of the demo last semester. I've added another guitarist and need to get some of the tunes ready again. Now that there is for sure another guitar, I can be a little more liberal with the arrangements I create for the rest of the band to listen to before we practice. This opens a lot of doors and I'm looking forward to working with him and making us sound, as we say...tits. 

In essence, a lot of shit is going on, and I know I'm trying to do quite a bit at once, but I'm just afraid my free time will dry up really fast, so I want to do as much as possible now. Here's to hoping this week is as productive as I want it to be.

Still excited.

Blog the first

This is my first blog under the advice of a certain book. This is supposed to increase my creativity and also make me more aware of what's going on. I plan on doing this once a week, reflecting on projects and issues I come across with in some of the work I've been doing. 

So far, this semester seems like I'll be able to get a lot more creative projects done. I also have a drive to do them that I haven't had for a while. I just finished both of my brothers newest mock spoken word poetry albums. I made some jazz bass lines and percussion to accompany his voice. It turned out pretty good as I familiarized myself more intimately with Garageband and it's capabilities. Want to clean it up in DP at some point, quantize the hell out of it.

In the process of writing and producing my second big podcast, taking a lot more time than I'd hoped, but I'm convinced I'll be done soon.

I also want to start writing for film, more series/cartoons I think, but it greatly appeals to me. I plan on going to archive.org and finding some videos and putting music to them in hope this will help me practice my writing for this medium. I think I could greatly excel at it, as I've enjoyed it in the past.  First and foremost, I need to get the video files from my bro that we created this winter so I can edit and compose for that short film. Should be awesome.

Excited.