No, this is not a review of the movie The Shawshank Redemption, though that is a good idea.  I claim this to be an audio blog, but so far I haven’t given you much evidence that I do anything but write music.  So, lets take a look at something else I’ve worked on:

At the end of fall 2011, I was in the last semester of recording classes I would have at CSUC, and I was tasked with a “film script” assignment.  We were given a choice of several scripts, many of them early drafts of the final film version. We were asked to select one scene or a handful of scene’s totaling around six minutes and re-create it by recording voice actors and sound effects in the studio, without video.  Now, if I had my way I would post a picture from the movie or the movie poster, but out of fear of copyright infringement, here is a picture of me playing a jade piano in Chinatown, in SF:

Yes I know, I get to have all the fun.

We had a lot of movies to choose from, but I ignored most all of them after I learned The Shawshank Redemption was one of them.  The biggest challenge I had was finding the right voice actors for each part, with the biggest being the part of Red, played by Morgan Freeman in the movie.  My friend and voice actor, Robbie Rickgauer stepped up to the role, and despite not having quite as deep a voice, managed to do a great job.  

Many of the sound effects here were recorded in the studio (foley), but just as many were found from one of two sound effects libraries I had at my disposal.  The music, I’m proud to say, I wrote and recorded myself.  Naoko Terakado played the piano, and you might recognize her from Elegy of the Falling Leaf.  The music was meant to imitate the soft, sad, contemplative piano that Thomas Newman used through most of the movie.

This project ate up more of my time than any other I’ve ever worked on, mostly because I had to take on the roles of script editor, recording engineer, mixing engineer, foley artist, sound designer, composer, arranger, and even voice actor (for a few small roles).  The piece was mixed through an API 1608 console and written to Peak Pro 7.  This is of course an MP3 rendering (which is terrible), and I not only have high quality versions at home, I have different mixes!  This was mixed in three stems, voices, sound effects, and music.  If you want to hear this without any of those, let me know.  

But thats not all!  One last thing we were required to do for the project was to mix 30 and 60 second trailers.  So, here is the 30 second trailer I did:

One of the things I’d like to do with this blog is talk about recording technology and to review it, if I get the chance.  Well, for the sake of somewhere to start, I figured I’d take a post to talk about my audio setup.  I’ve been asked before how to get started recording for cheap, and if there’s a setup out there thats as cheap as it gets (but with all the quality), it’s mine.  

Lets start with the basics.  Unless you have an old tape machine (and I’m not talking about a cassette player), you are gonna need a computer to record to.  And that computer needs some software to record with.  I started out with my MacBook Pro, and I have to say I love it; I’ve had it for upwards of 3 years and it’s not had a single problem.   Its got a 2.53 GHz Intel Core Duo core processor with 4 gigs of ram, and it hasn’t had a problem running any program I might need.  

The program I needed, is Logic Pro 9.  Logic is Apple’s hat they’ve tossed into the DAW (digital audio workstation) ring and by itself will cost you around $500.  However, apart from being an audio file editor, it has extensive options for composing, sampling, mixing, even DJ-ing if you get the right plug ins.  Logic is popular for its ease of use and broad range of tools.  I consider myself a multi-talented person, and I like to write music as much as I like to record it, so Logic’s multipurpose nature lends itself well to my needs.  I've also got Pro Tools, but I tend to stick with Logic because I'm more familiar with it. 

Now, usually a computer like that and a full version of Logic will be quite pricy, but along with some other toys (which I’ll get to in a minute), I bought them together for around $3500.  This was a deal, but I didn’t have a choice in the matter; CSUC requires all Composition and Recording Arts students to buy their bundle which also includes an Axiom 25 MIDI keyboard controller, a LaCie 500 gig hard drive, an Apogee Duet audio interface, and a handful of other very useful software.  Tools like that usually cost quite a bit more when you buy them separately, so I won’t complain I had to blow almost two years of scholarship money on them. 

Apart form the Axiom that came with the bundle, I’ve got another keyboard (an M-Audio 88 Keystation), two sets of speakers, and some professional headphones (some Shure SRH 440s to be exact). Rather than go in depth on any of those now I am going to take time to review each of those components in turn later. The next crucial step would be to get the sound from the air to your interface, and for that you need microphones.  However, I don’t yet have any, and I’ve so far relied on using other peoples microphones (when I’m not in the school’s studio). 

So, thats a birds eye view of my setup, and in a nutshell what you need:  a computer, recording software, an interface, and microphones.  Thats the bare bones of what you need to get started, and from there everything else is optional (though highly highly HIGHLY recommended).  I will talk more about my interface, speakers, and keyboards coming up, but if you’ve made it this far, you’ve earned some music.

This is a piece I wrote for a game through Chico State Game Studios called Galactic Enforcer.  The game was a Hitman-esque assassination game set in the future.  The game was for the iPhone and wasn’t even close to being released, so at the time of working on it all you did was accept a mission then shoot the correct guy on screen.   They planned to do more in depth strategy and whatnot, but the atmosphere is what got me.  The director wanted a very low-key mystery to it, with just a touch of sci-fi (you know, future).  So, I gave him Space Jazz.

Ok, so its not really jazz, but its about as close as I'll get without some jazz lessons.  Jazz is one of the few styles I have no experience in I'm afraid (but I do love to listen to it). I'll be posting more here on recording technology, methods and whatnot coming up.  So, if you're like me from four years ago and you don't have a clue about how to record that song you've spent all week writing to impress the girl down the block, stay tuned.

I know I just posted yesterday, but I’m getting antsy to put some stuff up here.  I will however, try to diversify things by posting something I doubt many of you have heard of mine though.  

Last fall I was invited to join up with Chico State Game Studios and work on a video game with them.  The game in question was “Communists VS Zombies”, which was a top-down tactical shooter.  You played as a Russian commissar in the middle of WWII Stalingrad, which has somehow become infested with zombies.  

The concept was pretty cool I thought, and I had a lot of fun working on it.  I did some sound effects, assisted with dialog (one of the soldier voices is actually me shouting in Russian), and of course, composed music.  At the end of the semester, I was awarded the Audio team MVP award for being a hard worker and being generally awesome.

This is actually the third piece I wrote for the game (only two of the three made it in) and I believe it is easily the best.  I had originally named the pieces after the levels they were written for, however a redesign of the game meant that levels had randomly selected music;   therefore this piece goes by the imaginitive title, CvZ Level 2.  

The artistic directors behind the game wanted the atmosphere of the game to be dark, almost comically dark; I was happy to oblige.  I studied my favorite slavic composers such as Shostakovich and Rachmaninov as well as soundtracks to movies such as Enemy at the Gates (scored by James Horner) to get the feel for what I wanted.  

This one has been a long time coming!  Around May of 2011, a friend of mine in the CSU, Chico Wind Ensemble asked me to write a piece for them.  Not long after that, my composition teacher at the time, Professor Dvorin asked the same question, saying that members of the Wind Ensemble had approached him about performing a student composition.

I began work in the fall of that year (hey, I was busy that summer!) and began to sketch ideas for a 6-8 minute piece.  Fall here in Chico is a beautiful time of year, with so many trees around the entire town turns into nature’s fireworks display.  I came up with the name before I’d even put a note to paper, and began to write a semi programatic work based on a leaf falling from a tree.  

Seven months later, I presented my “first draft” to the band.  Keep in mind this was my first time writing for many or most of these instruments, and so I had to teach myself every step of the way.  My Professional Orchestration textbook was my bible for those months.  The first draft was understandably taken apart by the band as each section in turn gave me advice on how to write for them better, and suggestions on what passages did or didn’t work.  

About a month after that, I submitted my ‘final’ draft.  I use the word final hesitantly because I feel that no piece is truly done, the composer just runs out of time.  A few weeks later the piece premiered at a concert entitled “Band Classics” on April 7th 2012, conducted by Dr. Royce Tevis.  

My hearty thanks go out to everyone who made this possible, especially the members of the band who worked very enthusiastically to help me better understand writing for them.  I’d also like to recognize Dr. Tevis who was not only very excited about getting this piece performed alongside more traditional concert works, but gave me resources to learn more and pointers on how to write in some places.  Also, thanks to Professor David Dvorin who helped me translate my chicken scratch ideas into something worth listening to.

So, I’ve been productive today; it took several hours, but I managed to get a great deal of music copyrighted through the electronic copyright office.  Strangely, the paperwork was the easy part, the annoyingly difficult part was uploading everything to their server.  Since I could only upload around 170 MB per setting, I had to upload only chunks of data at a time and convert larger videos to smaller ones so they’d fit.  Since I wanted to archive just about everything I’ve done, this meant I had to keep track of what was uploading, what still needed to be uploaded, what file names had to be changed or outright converted so that the finicky government server would accept it... you get the idea.  

But its done, and that means we can FINALLY put some decent music on here!   I’m going to give it a day to process before I go nuts-but still, progress!  So, in celebration of now being legally protected by way of blood sweat and paperwork, here is my first ever audio post on here!   

This piece was written for a game called "Sketchy Business"  http://www.chicostategamestudios.com/VideoGameProduction/SketchyBusiness.html; its about a doodle coming to life and fighting its way through pages of hand-drawn worlds.  I have to say, I love the concept.  The directors of the game wanted the music to be cheesy and over the top, and we on the audio team had a blast writing in that style.  This piece was to be used for a jungle level full of monkeys with guns, triceratops with jet packs, the usual...  Because it was for a game, its made to loop and doesn't have a definitive ending, but I think its alright nonetheless.
This also a speed composition, I wrote and mixed it in around four hours.

I wont deny I’d been putting this off; its not particularly fun to go through this many hoops, and I wasn’t willing to post anything unless it had been copyrighted first.  I’m going to be selecting my best pieces to put under the “profile” section, and the rest I’ll post here as part of the blog.  

All I can say is, thank God for 50ft ethernet cables; this would have taken much longer via wireless.

Cheers,
Kev

PS, it is unfortunate, but I've discovered I can only post MP3s up here, which lowers audio quality substantially.  This is sad, but at least you can hear it.