I'm Back

Well it's been 3 weeks since I last posted, but what a couple weeks it's been. The short story is, PitchFactor is about to ship, I have a beautiful new apartment in Hell's Kitchen into which I'll be moving next weekend, and I've completed a milestone for a research project I'm working on. The downside is no new music over the last couple of weeks.

The upside is that our new place uptown has a dedicated room for my studio/office so I'll be able to set everything up and finally mix a lot of stuff that I've worked on over the last couple of years. How's that for making economic lemonade?

Lesson: if you live in NYC, look for a new apartment right now, there are deals to be had.

Also, as I mentioned earlier in this post, PitchFactor has been out of my hands for about a week now for final testing and ramping up production and should be shipping out the door in the next couple of days. I think this is the most fun product I've ever worked on and the range of sounds you can get out of it is pretty ridiculous. I'm obviously biased, but if you're interested in these sort of things, check this one out.

Finally, I do have an update to that orchestral piece I was working on a couple of weeks ago. This is actually old progress but I never got a chance to post it, so here it is.





I decided to slow this track down a bit. I don't know if I like it more or less at 130 bpm than at 138 which is where it was previously, but it seemed like it was rushing before. Aside from that I've been spending time writing individual parts for each piece of the orchestra. One of the brilliant things about orchestra's is that instead of having 1, or even 3 or 4 musicians playing a piece by strumming or hammering out chords you have many musicians each playing there part. I think that leads to a much more linear than global sound. Instead of having a particular chord structure you have several sets of melody and harmonies that change over time. For me, this is a very different way of composing music than coming up with a series of chords on piano or guitar. Or different even than just placing chords on a piano roll which is what I tend to do with soft synths and samplers.

Creating an orchestra is a way for me to get out of the vertical space of chords into the horizontal space of melodies and harmonies.

I still want to do more of that with this track and hopefully expand it beyond it's current 2:13, but I've been having fun personalizing the individual parts so far.

Till Next Time,
Dan