Stay Calm

Not being a multitasker has its pros and cons. It allows me to be hyper focused when working on a project, but it also inhibits my ability to see the bigger picture. This does not work well when you are expected to manage several large projects at once. At times, things can get extremely overwhelming for my one- track brain. Even though we were warned several times during bootcamp not to panic, even though I took notes when Brian King told us to not freak out and to stay in the present, even when my wonderful mother told me not to worry....in the face of all of these warnings, I still lost my cool. It wasn't a "lying on the kitchen floor in your pajamas screaming at the ceiling" kind of melt down, instead it was a chronic deterioration of sanity.

(my notes from bootcamp)

In the wake this episode, I've added a new mantra to my current list. You see, posted on my wall, I have a list of qualities I want to project in my life. They include things like: Be Passionate, Be Enthusiastic, and Be Authentic. Tonight, I will add one....STAY CALM!!!!!

As I stumble my way through this program at USC, I can't help but make analogies to my marathon training days.  I am quite aware now that composing is mostly an endurance sport with elements of a 100 yard dash! When you train for a marathon, you are warned about the problems you encounter in the race: not pacing yourself in the beginning, eating while running, knowing when to hold it and when to dash for the portapotty, and hitting the wall. All these warnings are well and good, but until you've actually been running for more that 3 hours, you're never going to know what the wall really feels like! My point is this: all the advice I'm receiving this year will help me prepare for the challenges I will need to overcome, but forewarning is never a substitute for experience.

This past week, I finished work a number of new projects. Last weekend, we recorded our romantic cue at Firehouse Studios in Pasadena. We were given the choice of conducting our cues to click or free conducting to picture. Conducting to click means everyone has headphones and gets a steady metronome click so everyone is on the same page. Free conducting is where you, the conductor, watch the film as the musicians play and guide them to the correct timings. This method is more "old school," and used all the time by John Williams. As you can imagine, free conducting gets a more natural sound, but is a lot harder to do! Tyring to follow the "make your weakness your strength" mantra, I opted to free conduct my piece. Surprisingly, It was a lot of fun! Here's my romantic cue, A Bittersweet Affair.

(Me, Daniel, and Jonathan problem solving during the session @ Firehouse)

Another really fun project this week was composing a piece of music in the "Disney Style." Earlier in the semester, we tried our hand at music for animation in the Warner Brothers style. In contrast, the "Disney sound" is much more cute, gentile, heroic, and emotional. Here's a scene I scored from Pooh's Heffalump Movie.

Finally, for Lennie Moore's class on video game music, we had to do an action loop with branching. What that means is the main music piece will loop until an action occurs (like the player dies). At that point a new piece of music will play. The trick is trying to write music that transitions well at any point. Not easy. Here's my rip-off of Tyler Bates from the movie 300.  My piece is titled originally enough,  600.

Make Your Weakness Your Strength

You know how sometimes in the back of your mind you know something is going to fail? It's like watching a child carry a glass of milk that's a little to big for them. You don't want to be that overprotective hovering parent, but you know that they'll probably drop it. Well this weekend I spilled the milk.

This week we continued our series of "master classes," where we become more comfortable writing for all the different groups of instruments. Last week was percussion and this week was strings. Our assignment was to pick any 8 bars from a famous string quartet and pretend like the composer didn't have time to finish it. It was our job to complete the piece in the style of that composer and make the transition seamless. We were given 4 options to choose from for the quartets: Ravel, Debussy, early Bartok, and late Bartok. For those of you unfamiliar with these guys, Ravel and Debussy our more romantic and impressionistic, while Bartok is....hmm....how shall I put this....IN YA FACE! 

Our teacher, Pete Anthony, is big into this idea of making your weakness your strength, so I picked the style I was least comfortable with: late Bartok. I found a really rockin' 8 bars of Bartok and wrote a really fun piece. Composing was all well and good, but the one caveat to these master classes is that we have to conduct them. My piece was in 2/4. This basically means I wave my hand down then I wave my hand up and repeat as necessary. Let me be clear about this: A MONKEY COULD CONDUCT 2/4. However, I am not a monkey and I have a certain quirky way of hearing things. 

I got up to conduct and it was nothing short of a train wreck. We did 5 or 6 stop and starts and I eventually had to hand off the conducting duty to Jonathan, my fellow classmate. He was amazing and got a great performance out of the players. I still felt HORRIBLE falling on my face in front of some of the best string players in the world and one of the best conductors in hollywood. Yikes.

I stood in front of Pete after the session and laid out my best excuses: "It was a tricky passage, I am not a conductor, etc..." Pete was very patient and let me finish my justification parade. All he said was: "Make your weakness your strength." So that's what I've gotta do. 

For your listening pleasure, here's my version of the Bartok string quartet. 

Also, the other big happening this week was our first USC director/composer meet and greet! We heard a ton of great pitches and met a lot of really cool film makers. I'm in talks with a few of them right now to work on their projects, but I'm also trying not to bite off more than I can chew. 

Finally, this week we also had to write a 1 minute seamless loop of music for Lennie's class. I did it in the style of Jon Brion. Here's the unlooped version. Bring out the whistles!

I just want to bang on the drum all day

This week started off with a BANG! Monday we went to Fox Studios and saw John Powell record an orchestra for the new Disney animated flick called Bolt. What a thrill! As great as it is to hear an awesome score in the theater or on a CD, NOTHING, nope, NOTHING compares to a live orchestra. It was magical to see the very first moment when music and picture are married together. 

During the session we also got to meet Michael Mollo, John Powell's assistant. Michael actually graduated from the USC SMPTV program (Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television) a couple years ago. He's doing extremely well for himself and he is very inspiring. With a little luck and some hard work I could be working for an A list composer in a couple years too! What a thought.

Even though it started off with such an inspiring experience, this was a very trying week for me. On Wednesday, my computer decided it didn't want to work anymore. This happened right before a major project was due. I stayed up for two nights in a row trying to fix things and I just squeaked out a solution before the deadline. All I can say is that I'm happy it happened now and not before a final project! 

Towards the end of the week, over 4 days I only slept for like 7 hours. NOT something to be proud of. What you want to do instead is to "golf on fridays." Let me explain. There are some composers who cram, make last minute changes, obsess, etc. Then there are others who get their work done early and are golfing on friday before their Saturday recording session. I was definitely not golfing on friday. Maybe my goal should be to sleep on friday : )

Anyways, I managed to get my work done and I got a great recording of my piece. The assignment was to score an action scene from the movie The General's Daughter with only percussion. We had some amazing players and I got the thrilling but rewarding experience of conducting my own music. Here's the scene I scored from The General's Daughter.

I've caught up on some very much needed sleep and I'm gearing up for next week's onslaught...

Rubbin' Shoulders

I just finished the first two weeks of classes and my head is still in a tailspin. Here are my classes so far:

Eric Schmidt - composing and conducting

(Eric is a big cartoon music guy. He's worked on classics like Tom and Jerry Anamaniacs, Tiny Toons, etc....)

Pete Anthony - composing master class

(Pete is one of Hollywoods premier conductors and orchestrators. He works for guys like James Newton-Howard, John Powell, and Danny Elfman. If you've seen a blockbuster lately, chances are Pete has conducted it.)

Steve Juliani - music preparation

(Music prep is when you make the parts from the score. There are only a few music prep companies in LA, and Steve owns one of them.)

John Burlingame - film music history

(John is fantastic. He is one of the leading film score historians, and he is absolutely in love film music. All we do watch great films and geek-out about the score. It's heaven.)

Jack Smalley - Advanced Film Compostion

(Jack is in his mid 70's so he doesn't care what anyone thinks about him, so he's so much fun to be around. He's written tons of classic TV scores for shows like Charlie's Angels, Knight Rider, and Murder She Wrote!)

Rick Schmunk - Score editing with protools

(Rick is one of the few instructors who's actually a teacher! Consequently, his class is a little easier to follow than the rest)

Lennie Moore - Composition Techniques for Film and Video games

(I've actually had the please of meeting Lennie a few years ago when I did the semester in LA program through columbia. The man is a technical wizard. He's also got a ton of energy. You know that squirrel from Ice Age? That's Lennie.)

Brad Dechter - Orchestration

(Brad is one of the most in demand orchestrators in LA, yet he's is so laid back and modest about his work. Just this year he's orchestrated films like The Dark Knight, The Mummy, Hancock, Horton Hears a Who, Charlie Wilsons War, Michael Clayton, Hairspray, and the list goes on... Right now he's doing arrangements for up coming albums from Seal and Chris Botti. I got brad's autograph, haha : )

These are my teachers so far and there are many more to come. I wanted to show your the caliber and experience these guys have. People like Brad Dechter and Pete Anthony I've admired for a long time, and now I'm rubbin' shoulders with them! I still have to pinch myself every once in a while.

Last weekend, the whole class decided to have a fun weekend before things started to get too crazy. On Friday, we went and saw John Williams at the Hollywood Bowl, which was absolutely magical. Then on Saturday, Fabrizio (our very Italian classmate) cooked all of us an authentic Italian meal. Good people, good times. Here we are at the hollywood bowl after being mesmerized by Johnny Williams, and then us wining and dining.

This week I've also finally set up my little studio in my apartment. I've got a new keyboard, speakers, and a bunch of other goodies. Here's my "studio":

We finished our first major assignment last tuesday. We had to compose a minute and a half of music in the style of Warner Brothers cartoons. Sounds easy, right? Cartoon music is a blast to write, but there are hit points galore. When the music follows along with exactly what's happening on screen, it's called "Mickey Mousing." You can imagine this name came about because of it's popularity in films staring the mouse himself. I learned a ton from the experience and can't wait to compose more for animation. Here's the excerpt from Tom and Jerry that I scored.

Also, I've just finished my first student film score here at USC. It was a music video with the song done in the style of Johnny Cash. I contracted players, wrote the music, produced the session, and we recorded and mixed at the Spielberg Scoring stage here on campus. I met a ton of great new friends, and it was a great start to my scoring experience here in LA.

Finally, this weekend we had the privilege of meeting some extremely talented people in the industry. On Friday, we met with composers Ed Sheurmer (KPAX, The Count of Monte Cristo, Wimbledon) and Teddy Shapiro (Tropic Thunder, Semi-pro, Dogeball). Both guys were extremely welcoming and they both led relatively normal lives! They had families and pretty much kept and normal schedule. It was inspiring to see that having a family and being a film composer is a possibility after all.

Then on Saturday, we met with MB Gordy, one of LA's premier percussion players. He does all the percussion on shows like Battlestar Galactica and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It was SO much fun. All we did was be like little kids and bang on stuff. He gave us a treasure chest full of new sounds and techniques to incorporate into our writing. AND, he was incredibly nice and fun to hang with (notice this is a trend with all the top guys).

Wow, so that's the last to weeks. Sorry for the super long post. I hope you're all doing well. I miss you Chicago!

LET 'ER BUCK!!!

So....boot camp is over! It was quite the whirl wind tour through all the software we will be using this year. We had two projects that we worked on these past two weeks. I'll try to keep the geek-speek to a minimum and keep it easy to understand : )

First, we did a mock-up (making a synthesized orchestra in the computer) of a cue (cue is another word for song) from HIDALGO!!!! The whole time I couldn't help but think of my trip to Dan Beirne's cabin when we explored lake Michigan by day and watched Hidalgo at night. Oh, memories....

Second, we wrote trailer music for "Man on Fire," which was a ton of fun. I won't post the hidalgo cue cause it's kinda boring, but here's the Man on Fire trailer music that I wrote.

I was thinking today how my life is a lot like the scene from hidalgo that we worked on. You see, Frank Hopkins (played by Viggo Mortensen) has been racing his horse named Hidalgo across the desert for like a week straight. He's got the finish line in his sights and he's vying with another guy for first place. They're neck and neck where Frank yells "LET 'ER BUCK!!" He kicks it into high gear for the start of the REAL race. 

That's what I feel like. I've been "racing" for the past six years, but I've only now reached the start of the REAL race. This is the time where I put it into high gear.  So......... "LET 'ER BUCK!!!!"  

It hasn't been all work and no play though. Last weekend I visited the Getty art museum and this weekend we're going to the beach as a class - surfs up!!!!!

Bracing for Impact

Wow, where to begin...

After our 5 day trip out here to sunny soCal (click here to see our pictures), Laura and I unpacked, went to the beach, and then went to the beach some more! Even though the California coast ain't got nothin' on the Florida coast, being at the beach finally made me feel like I was actually in California. UPDATE: Laura had her tonsils out and almost died (not really), but she's much better now.

This week has been fantastic. Well, the second half of it at least. I'll be honest. I'll admit it. I was homesick. Settling in to a foreign place can be tough. California has no Jimmy Johns, no Paneras, no Jewels or Dominicks, no Meijers, no BPs. Drivers here don't cut you off like in Chicago. People here walk slower. Traffic is terrible. No wait, traffic in Chicago is terrible too. At least somethings are like home!

Part of settling in is preparing yourself for contact, or bracing for impact. You except certain responses out of certain things. Like when you jump on a bed, it's supposed to be soft and springy, it's not supposed to feel like concrete. LA is supposed to be filled with ego centric, rude, crazy people. Instead, the people I've met here so far are very nice, down to earth, laid back people. I was bracing for steel, and instead I got Jell-O.

I was poised for collision again on Thursday night when I met some of my new classmates in the film scoring program. Composers can have a reputation for being quiet and brooding. I was expecting to be the one to liven things up. Instead, I found myself trying to keep up with them! Everyone was funny, lighthearted, and honest. I guess film composers are a different breed.

As I find myself preparing for school to start tomorrow, I'm trying to go into it without any preconceived notions. It might be a crash, a belly flop, or even a trampoline. Either way, I'm staying open minded.


HIGHLIGHTS:

• I piggy backed a tour with the Columbia College film scoring grad students and we got to chat with Johnny Kilmek (Composer for Without a Trace, Deadwood, one Hour Photo, and Run Lola Run)
• We ran into Pedro last night at an In-N-Out Burger. Like "Vote for Pedro," from Napoleon Dynamite. That Pedro.