A Word is Worth a Thousand Notes

Work has been continuously chugging along on Alice Unraveled for the past week or so. It appears I found my muse in an in-progress cover of "Cannibal" by Ke$ha. Sometimes all it takes is the realization that you had the first chord of the chorus confused to spark ALL of your work to completion. The latest arrangement brought to the party borrows heavily from Phil Spector produced groups, namely The Rhonettes and is my take on that 60s girl-pop sound. It's somewhat hard to convey with my sample set, but hopefully the idea gets across well. James Perrella was kind enough to quick-mix it, and it's not indicative of his actual mixing prowess at all. But he's a much better mixer than I, so even a couple of hours put into it equals days of me trying to mix it. Lots of problems with this rendition, but hey, it's a first draft. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.
Who Are You? by Michael Hart

And as always, pimp my music out!

Really, though, I wanted to share an insight with you that happened upon me just last night. All throughout my life, and musical career, I never put much value into lyrics. If they were good or bad, sure, I'd take notice and be able to determine if they were good or bad. But it wouldn't affect my interest in the song at all. It's played a small part in how my music has turned out (hey, there's no lyrics in film scores; I'm an awful lyricist), and when asked to do arrangements I'd keep them in mind but ultimately not pay too terribly much attention to them.

Kelly Izzo and I hit a few mishaps during this whole process of arranging for Alice Unraveled, where she approaches things from a very simple, very minimalist point of view and I... well, do not. I love my bombast. I was re-listening to the demo tracks last night to try and get arrangement ideas and I hit the title track of the musical. Which, if you haven't heard it, is absolutely phenomenal. So I was listening, blah de blah, it finished, I had an idea when something changed. Something resonated in my head.

"Something was lost, when I couldn't see/with the lights turned off".

I don't know why it struck such a chord, but I listened to the song again. And really listened to the words this time. By the end of the song I was shaking. It finally all fell into perspective; here's a musical about a girl who's thrown into an awful situation by herself and lays her heart out for the whole world to see, only to have no one care. It was an incredibly moving moment.

Again I go back to this point I've made before, but this time with a new perspective: for all of our mass produced, synthesized, hugely arranged pop, electronica, anything with a club kick... does it matter what they say? Hell, even singer-songwriters do it too, drowning the message in washes of guitar layers and strings. Far too many are concerned with a pristine sounding record, how loud it gets, how deep the bass is, whether or not it'll move a million units.

Valid points? Sure.

The only points? Fuck that.

Sometimes it only takes a girl with a guitar, recording into a Macbook camera mic, to make you realize how vulnerable you really are.

I'm still in awe.

And All That Jazz (Not Really)

Busy.

Busy busy busy.

But hey, Salvation Denied is playing a show in Manhattan on Saturday!

To elaborate a bit:

Downtown Cabaret is a concert put on by a collaborative effort between many of the arts programs here at SUNY Purchase. My program (Studio Composition... but if you read this blog, that should be beaten into your head by now) has the biggest stake in the show; we have performances from 8 to around midnight, usually. There's a TON of fantastic performers playing, including longtime collaborator Kelly Izzo, my good friend Leila, my new favorite Purchase band The Bearing (who my housemate has been mixing for the past month, and who've been stuck in my head since then) and too many others to list.

We perform at 9:30 PM Saturday night. Should have a 25 minute set, give or take; Downtown Cab is still finalizing all of the scheduling issues. For complete schedules Friday and Saturday, click here and here, respectively.

Forgive if updates are a bit spotty for the next couple of weeks. I'm in the thick of film scoring now. Receiver,  Merry Christmas Eve, and the newest project I just got, Welcome To Willard, directed by Nicole Favale, will be occupying every waking hour from here until the first or second week in May. I'm incredibly pleased to be working with such talented directors; I like to complain about my work sometimes, but these three in particular are a blast. I'll have audio very soon.

You know what? Fuck it. I'm closing this blog post with The Bearing's newest single, lest you're too lazy to click on the link above. I hope you enjoy it (though they don't want to admit it, I totally helped mix it a little bit. Boosting guitars is my idea. But this time it WORKED)

Madness Is Quiet

Not 5 minutes before I started writing this blog post, I was made aware of some very upsetting news. One of my favorite live bands, RX Bandits, just announced that their upcoming summer tour would be their last. If you aren't aware of who RX Bandits are, you're doing yourself an incredible disservice. The Bandits started off as your run of the mill ska band, but gradually warped into something rather unclassifiable. Equal parts rock, psychedelic, progressive, reggae and a whole host of other genres mashed together in one large melting pot, the group has a habit of recording all of their albums live, with a minimal amount of overdubs. Which, if you haven't done before, takes an extreme degree of talent to pull off at the level that they can.

I've seen them at least once every year since my sophomore or junior year of high school (it's been a while) and they're by far one of the best live shows I've seen. High energy, the entire crowd sings along, and the band never stops for a second. It's sad to see them go, but I'm sure their final string of shows will be among the best.



Onto happier news:

Kelly and I recently completed another rough arrangement from Alice Unraveled, entitled "Rose Petals". In the musical, it details the main character coming home from the party where she was just assaulted, and her slow descent into madness and Wonderland as she attempts to cope with what just happened. It's dark, yet oddly beautiful and poignant.

Kelly's original scratch track was in E minor and much slower than it is here. I decided to speed it up a bit, roughly 15 bpm, and changed the key to F minor. F minor is much darker sounding, contributing to the vibe we were going for. The BPM change happened in order to provide more variety to the arrangement; the original repeated the same arpeggiating pattern over and over, whereas the new alternates between quarter note and 8th note grids.

Laryngitis while recording a scratch vocal track was an issue for Kelly, but she still managed to turn in quite a beautiful performance. We left her voice bone dry, in some contrast to the rest of the arrangement, and it sits wonderfully in the scope of the mix: right in front of your eyes and backed by a harp, string trio and an assortment of electronic noises and drum hits.

The arrangement's still not finalized yet; the end in particular needs some work, when the electronic elements kick in full force, and the large drum hits we agreed on are far too big for the scope of the song. However, I think it's a pretty good representation of the final product, and I can't wait until we can put together an ensemble and hear how it sounds on all live instruments.

Rose Petals by Michael Hart

The rest of my week is taken up by scoring Merry Christmas Eve, of which I just received a rough cut. It's a monster at the moment with a 45 minute runtime, but Alyssa's going to be trimming, trimming, trimming over the next week or two. I have some great ideas for the score already, some involving my favorite 30 second decay reverb patch. AMBIENCE.

I'll update you all again at some point this week; it contains our school's biggest festival of the year, Culture Shock, and Ke$ha live in concert for me tomorrow. I'm incredibly excited.

Alice, Slowly Unraveling

I told y'all I'd be back this week.

Before I get into my blog post, though, have you witnessed "Friday" by Rebecca Black yet? I'm sure it's been beaten to death in the past 5 or so days, but in case you didn't know, the video's a production of the Ark Music Factory, which as far as I can tell is solely designed to separate extremely rich parents from their money in the hopes that their young daughter will become a pop star.

Good. Fucking. Luck.



Now, onto music that really matters.

In my previous post, I detailed an arrangement of Cole Porter's "Love For Sale" that Kelly Izzo and I did recently, and I thought I'd share it with you all. It's... an interesting treatment, to say the least. Thankfully Kelly liked it, and was even keen on the idea of translating the color palette used in the arrangement to her upcoming musical I'm orchestrating, Alice Unraveled.

Love For Sale Arrangement by Michael Hart

But in ADDITION to that, she gave me the OK to post a scratch arrangement of the opening song I did. The song's called "Space And Time", and admittedly, this was the throwaway arrangement. Our independent study teacher who's working closely with us on the project asked me to create two arrangements for the song. The first I worked my heart out on, crafting a guitar driven arrangement with string quartet (actually, more like string orchestra... I love my big string patches, ok?), tubular bells, distorted drums, the whole nine yards. It was big, it was bombastic, I thought it worked really well as an opener to a musical.

The day before I have to present the arrangement comes, and I realize that I still had the entire other one to do. I had spent much more time crafting the first arrangement, I completely forgot about the second! In my haste, I decided to go an entirely different route. Removing the guitars entirely, I decided to make the piece spacious, with a small palette of instruments. Held synth chords, a lead reminiscent of a clarinet, glockenspiel, and eventually bass synth, drums and an extra synth pad painted a picture DRASTICALLY different than my first arrangement.

Of course, my teacher and Kelly liked the second one better. And after listening through again, I'm inclined to agree. It's still very much a work in progress; the glockenspiel gets painful and piercing at points, and the wedge form of the arrangement clashed with Kelly's original interpretation of the song. She thinks the ending is still too big. Personally, I like it, but I agree in the context of the musical it's entirely wrong. We're going back to the drawing board relatively soon to finish this up and dig into the rest of the musical, so I'll have updates as they come.

Space And Time by Michael Hart

I also have details about a new movie I've been tasked to score. At least, I think I have. More on that in the coming weeks.

Enjoy FREE MUSIC!