Film/TV/Games Project: Short Film (Ambush)

Perhaps the largest single-song project of the year! It ALSO got lost in the Great Hard Drive Fiasco. An absolute heartbreaker. It had to be rebuilt on a miniature keyboard while I was on the road with the family. My instructor, Dave Bernstein, was gracious enough to let me have a deadline extension, but wow… so hard to motivate yourself to do things you’ve already done once. I am really grateful that I was able to remember the basics of the different sections. Especially the piano ditty over the end credits… I was really in love with that section the first time I wrote it, so I was panicking when I first lost my data and realized I couldn’t remember that part. But yeah, the melody came to me suddenly a few days later, thank God. I just found myself humming it, and when I realized what was going on, I was like, ‘YEAHHHHH” and ran to the computer to play it in before I forgot again.

ANYWAY. This was an intimidating project… it’s harder to do subtle variations of the same mood than it is to just change moods altogether. I chose it out of our dozen options because it had dialogue and SFX (the others already had bg music, which meant you had to delete the dialogue and SFX), and I find that I’m unsatisfied with a final project that isn’t actually finished… I like to be able to pair the audio track with the video and then say, “Done! Now we can show people!” Finally, I’m not sure why, but the bass seems to be really lacking. I’m choosing to believe that it’s my headphones, but when I get home to Vancouver I will have to check this out on my monitors to see what’s going on there. Okay. Please enjoy:

Film/TV/Games Project: Van City Ads

Wrote a couple of tunes to back up some old Van City adverts. We were meant to use a common musical theme. This ad was meant to show some glorious scenery and such, so we were meant to come up with something majestic. Wish I could go back in and edit this, but sadly the project files were lost in the Great Hard Drive Fiasco of 2012, so we’re stuck with the timid-sounding pizzicato on the front and the epic drums at the end that make it seem like a bank thinks it’s in the Lord of the Rings or Batman or something. Woops.

This second ad is meant to be more intimate than the other one, so hopefully the music reflects that. I think this piece fits better than the other Van City ad. Still sounds kind of cheesy though. I can’t say I thought much of either of these ads to begin with though. Anyway.

Film/TV/Games: Game Cues

We were told to create two cues for a video game – one sounding more hesitant, like you’re walking through a mysterious cave or some nonsense – and the other adding some energy as though you were starting some fighting. Could have added a lot more energy to the second cue, but after the Great Hard Drive Fiasco this .wav export became the only existing copy of this music. So I’d have to rewrite it all to get it back into an editable project form. Sad news.

Songwriting Project: Radio Ads

Had to make a couple of radio ads for songwriting, including music AND copy. This was thrown together while I was on the road, so I used my built-in microphone to record the vocals. Got the family to clear out of Grampa’s living room and did a quick couple of takes. Don’t ask about the weird accent on this first one, because I really don’t know where that came from. I just started reading the copy and it came out that way. The ad was meant to be for some kind of new, colourful diapers, with childish music and so on. Here:

The second ad was for a luxury airline service. It hopefully sounds positive and energetic, but in a peaceful kind of way. Positive energy. I think that’s kind of what I was going for – it’s sort of meant to be a hip luxury airline service that specializes creating a certain atmosphere. That’s what it said on the brief anyway. No accent here. I went for a soothing, breathier sort of voice. Again, I don’t know why, I just felt like it would work. Some words got a consonant clipped off the front, which is sad news. I think I probably left the “reduce ambient noise” feature checked. Woops. Anyway.

Songwriting Project: “And The Ocean… Will Move On… To The Semifinals”

I wrote some lyrics in class with my buddy Jordan Irwin (soundcloud.com/riverofkings). We ran out of time and wrote whatever we could think of. The title is how it is because we were thinking about Eurocup. Anyway, we both wound up doing our own melodies to the lyrics for a subsequent songwriting project, and here is my version:

Again, kind of wishing I could just not publish this stuff (partly because I’m embarrassed about my singing, but even more so on these ones because the recording quality is so atrocious), but I made a deal with myself that I’d publish everything from class, and I can’t really back down now.

Songwriting Project: Nothing Lasts Forever

Okay, it’s been AGES, but here’s the story: Final projects came up, and then my hard drive crashed a mere week before the projects were all due. Five days actually. How crazy is that? In all my life, no drive has ever failed on me, and then boom, mine dies at the most critical moment in my life so far. Ridiculous. Anyway, I hadn’t backed up my drive in a few weeks (I know… terrible mistake… I got careless) and therefore had to REDO a whole bunch of work. Talk about uninspiring.

Then in August I went on a month-long road trip with my family to visit some relatives in Nova Scotia and Toronto. Our internet was sketchy at best, so I couldn’t upload anything. And that brings us to now, at which time I am adding the results of that wild week of wrelentless work.

Okay, the story for this track is that our Advanced Songwriting instructor co-wrote some lyrics way back in the day when she was still in bands and such, and told us to make up a tune for them and put it to music. Apparently the original was kind of a poppy, almost country sort of song. This is my effort:

Sorry about the recording quality. You have no idea how upset I am at the miserable quality of my M-Audio Mobile Pre. In fact, I am going to tag this post with “M-Audio Mobile Pre” so that people come here, read about how awful it is, and don’t buy one. My beef is that it’s incredibly noisy once you add input gain. It records better stuff when you just leave the gain super low – too low for good recording practice – and then boost the gain in the box. Anyway, I was in a HUGE rush (had about three hours to record and mix two songs), so by the time I realized the awful noise, I was too far along to change things up.