Elevation

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Wow, October already?  Sometimes, it blows my mind how fast time moves… having a 9-5 on top of my music and sound design stuff always seems to drain me, and I get far less stuff done than most of my audio peers, but that doesn’t mean I don’t keep trying.

In fact, I’ve been fairly busy: I’ve done two pieces of music for Elevation Studios, and I’ve been session-guitaring for Juliet Richardson’s new project.

Unfortunately, I can’t show you much of Juliet’s stuff, but, trust me, it’s awesome, but I can show you are the two Elevation Studios projects.

First up, K2.

For this, I was asked to not just emulate, but straight-up COVER the iPhone 3G commercial music — a song called You, Me and the Bourgeoisie, by the Submarines.  I ran into a problem with the drums, because midi-based drum fills NEVER feel that good, so I followed the general rule of thumb with covers and added a breakbeat instead.

After that, came ARC.

Elevation Studios has been busier than usual, too, so I was asked to write another piece of original music, within the same vein as the rest of the music I’ve written for ES.  In this project, I ran into something that was both a blessing and a curse — a track limit.  I prefer to mix my music in Sonar LE 8.5, because the interface just feels better for mixing than Sonar Home Studio, but when I transferred my project over, I lost somewhere between 4 and 10 tracks.  At first, I was upset, though I could always just mix in HS, but after I listened to the music, I was a lot happier with the stripped down version than the version that had all the extra bells and whistles (not literally).

This is the track I wrote:

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And this is what Brandon did with it.  I love being able to trust Brandon with my music, knowing that he’s not going to have any obviously bad transitions.

Thanks for listening.

As usual, let me know what you think.

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Wow… it’s been a week and a half since the last time.  Looks like you’re getting two this week.

Why the long break, you ask? (Well, I assume you asked, or will ask)  I’ve been busy.  Not with writing music, but with playing it.

All last week, with the exception of Tuesday and Wednesday (of which I only remember Tuesday… no idea what I did mid-week) I was either practicing for, or actually performing, a Good Friday presentation for K2 the CHurch, which was stellar.

Then I took the weekend to recoup, and last night I returned to my sequencers.  Hopefully I’ll have something to show you by my next blog.

Until then, check out Mike Rut; he’s the worship leader and artistic director for K2, and one hell of a guitar player.  It was truly a pleasure to work with him, both recording and performing.

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A few videos

I didn’t write this music, dialogue, or anything, but these videos mean a lot to me. Not only are they Brandon Irwin’s work, but they’re about my faith.

I try not to write much about my faith here on this blog, trying to keep it as professional as I can, but the truth is I’m a Christian, and I’m proud of it. :)

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This Entry by Dave Matney, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Breathe.  I can finally breathe again.  And sleep, at least for a little while.

I don’t remember much of this weekend, to be honest; starting Thursday at 7:00, I spent almost EVERY waking hour on music.  Fifty three hours, to be exact. Seven to ten Thursday at practice, ten to one after that on composing, six thirty Friday morning ‘til ten playing guitar behind my friend Perko for a local news show (we played probably less than 5 minutes on air, and even then the sound was pretty awful; we sounded great live, and on air you couldn’t tell), then after a quick lunch I spent the next six or seven hours troubleshooting my computer so I could then stay up ‘til one again working on music.  Saturday was straight through; seven AM to one AM.

Sunday I played guitar at church, then went home and had an unplanned break (my wife –who was in Idaho 2 hours away from me– was in the ER the night before, nothing major, and she was pretty much dead to the world in pain and on pain meds, so I hung out with my son. Then I was so exhausted I couldn’t stand up from laying on the floor; I don’t remember going to bed.)

Back to work on Monday, at 8 am, and when I got home at six thirty, I started pounding away at music, until 3 am. 3 out of 5 songs finished, and that’ll have to do.  1 song completely scrapped, and rewritten twice in the previous week, the last time started just before one am.

That was last night; back to work at 8 am this morning, and I think my body realized when I was done with my morning appointments that, hey, I don’t have an immediate deadline looming.  I don’t have anything that’s forcing me to keep going, so now I must rest.

And rest I will, just not yet.

So… what all came from this?

Churches – New York

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This track, I feel, is the best track of all the ones I worked on this weekend.  I feel I need to clarify that this isn’t the production track; I cut apart and spliced together a different version to go below the film, and later I’ll clean this up for my portfolio. Just not yet.

I wrote, programmed, and recorded everything in this track.

Churches – Florida 2

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This track was built over the weekend, using an idea I started six or so months ago.  Everything within it was written by me, except the drum march;  I don’t remember which Gershwin tune I took it from, but I found a few MIDI files of Gershwin marches, took one, cut up the snare part into a loop that I liked, layered another snare part on top of it, and threw a kick below it.  So… TECHNICALLY Gershwin wrote the march… but only as much as the original photographers design elementary school collages.

Churches – Florida 1

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With Brandon throwing out ideas left and right, I wrote and recorded this song in two hours, with the first notes being struck just before 1 AM.  It’s intentionally sloppy.  The drum parts are Midi loops by Groove Monkey.

To write these, I used Sonar LE, various parts of Native Instrument’s Komplete and their Kore Player, Line 6′s PODFarm, and Make Music’s Finale.

Please, critique these.  And I’ll let you know when the videos that they’re for make it online, if they ever do.

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This Entry, Florida 1.1 by Dave Matney, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

For the record, I’m absolutely loving life, and having a place that I can upload examples of what I’m working on.  So far, though, all I’ve uploaded are general ideas that I haven’t fleshed out; this one’s not really going to change that, either.  Sorry.

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This is the third track in the Churches series (two per location).  Brandon wanted something happy, and the song he featured had a piano over a hip-hop beat. I’m not to positive on the tuba; I thought about adding more horns, but my samples aren’t that great, and I don’t have the time to make them sound that good.  So, the tuba might go. I’m sure real bass and real guitar will make an appearance in this, as well.

Without the Electric Tech-Hop piece, I don’t know how well I would have been able to write this beat, either, so it’s good that my random pieces can count as some sort of practice.

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This Entry, Track One by Dave Matney, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

My buddy Brandon has some sweet projects coming up in the next little while, and he’s asked me to write music for them.  This is one track that I’m working on for it.  It’s slow, and somber, and right now only has two instruments, but I think you can get a general feel for where it’s headed.

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