April 2021 Wrap-Up

I'm optimistic. Life seems to be slowly coming back and it seems like we're all slowly waking up again from more than a year of sleep. I'm particularly happy about the fact that there are live events being planned again. Over the last couple of weeks I got booked to arrange three live shows over the next few months which I am very happy about but even more about the fact that there is a serious chance that these will actually take place as scheduled. So it seems like things are finally picking up speed again.

This also gives us the possibility to seriously start planning the first Orchestra Discovery Session which is still waiting for its premiere due to the pandemic. But I'm optimistic that in the forseeable future we will be able to actually schedule the session.

In other news, I was working my way through that "mystery" piece over the last couple of weeks. I have been posting the first part of the composition screencasts a few weeks back and the next part will follow on Monday. Unfortunately I needed to cut corners in recording the mockup process as screen recording and mock-up was a bit too much for my relatively old main machine so I couldn't document everything but still made a few stops on the way through the piece and explained what was going on. I have to say that I am very pleased with how the mockup turned out. I used that piece to experiment a bit with different reverbs and a few other audio processing things and also used it to further tweak my template. Also, I gave the new articulation management system in Studio One a first serious run and it really improved my workflow and work speed tremendously. I will post the mock-up next week as well to show you the result.

I was posting about this already when it happened a few weeks ago but I still can't believe that we surpassed 100 Patrons here. Just thinking about the fact that there are more than 100 people who are willing to spend their hard earned money to read all these poorly disguised rants about modern film music that I'm posting here (okay, and the occasional nerding out about theoretical stuff) is just mindboggling. So once again: THANK YOU!

By the way, I pre-ordered Tallinn by Orchestral Tools. Not because I need it but because I want it. So this is where all your Patreon money goes to :) I was really impressed by the demos, especially the choir seems to be particularly great sounding. The music that one can create with it is relatively far away from what I usually do but maybe this will inspire me to once avoid writing pieces with 1000 notes per second.

Speaking of, I will be working on a commercial end May that will most likely be needing a lot of colourful orchestral Disneyish music and I'm planning on documenting the writing process as a Composition Screencast. I feel it might be more beneficial if I show you "real world " projects where I'm writing to images rather than doing free projects without context. It's not 100% clear whether I will get permission to actually do this but I'm relatively confident that once that commercial is released it should also be fine to show the process of the music in this confined space of a Patreon channel.

So, let's all hope we can all go back to normal relatively soon, I'm really over "remote sessions" by now, even though this is a marginal problem considering what other people have to deal with during these times.

But I feel there is a quite bright light at the end of the tunnel, finally.

Stay safe and healthy and thanks for being here!

Robin