Not A Blog™

First off today, you may have noticed that the design of this Not A Blog™ has changed slightly. That’s due to me upgrading—which was itself due to a security vulnerability that was recently discovered in the WordPress software. The upgrading broke all my hand-crafted CSS, and I’m entirely too lazy/busy to go back and try to make things exactly as they were. (Besides, I inadvertently broke it myself when I tried to add an extra section above the post. That’s “fixed” in the sense that my code is no longer hanging around gumming up the works.) Suffice it to say that the visuals changed slightly; don’t let it bother you.

As I mentioned recently, I got some new toys. One that I finally was able to play with is a piece of sequencing software for the Mac called Reason. I had to get something because my previous sequencer of choice, FL Studio, is PC only. I’ve gone years—years—without writing any music and it’s killing me, in a manner of speaking. Well, it turns out that Reason is much better in many respects, and for that I can forgive the few shortcomings it has over FL.

In order to teach myself the software, I threw together this 30 second theme. I’ve had this riff kicking around in my head for a few months now, and I was unable to do anything with it since I didn’t have music-writing software. When I got Reason, I also discovered that it had a bunch of orchestral, “realistic” sounding patches and samples, so I had to try it. This is so awesome I don’t even have words to describe it.

The theme is supposed to be a cheesy, pulp-science-fiction-esque theme. A lot of masculine brass, heroic, overly optimistic but with a hint of intrigue and the mystery of the unknown. (Boy, that sounds like BS, huh? It’s true though!) I took orchestral cues from John Williams, Hans Zimmer, David Arkenstone, Jerry Goldsmith, and Gustav Holst—all composers who have done this sort of thing.

This was huge amounts of Fun. I definitely want to do more like this. It’s rough around the edges, because I’m still learning the software, and because I’ve never tried to compose an “orchestra” before. I spent a lot of time listening to other songs like this and stealing elements. I expect to develop my own style, though, if I keep at it. Hopefully I will, and I can make every Sunday a Song Sunday. (Although judging by the amount of time this kind of thing wastes, I’ll be surprised if I keep up with it for any length of time.)

This composition was a great learning experience. It’s amazing how approximate everything can be (I played it into the computer with my MIDI keyboard and tweaked it by hand rather than programming everything to the beat) and still have it sound correct. That being said, I’ve noticed that the harder the attack on an instrument, the more exact it has to be or your brain will recognize that it’s off. The bells, for example, kicked my ass. I spent almost as much time on them as the entire rest of the song—and they’re still wrong. Whatever.

I don’t have a title for it, like so much of my stuff. I’ll just post it here as what I have it called on my computer: Space Opera Theme.

-Ted