my buddy noah tabakin and i were hired on this year as music directors for New Belgium Brewing Company’s Tour de Fat this summer, and it’s been a great time!
so far we’ve played:
Chicago,
Milwaukee
Minneapolis
Seattle
Portland
Boise
and our next stop is the Brewery’s home-base, Fort Collins, CO!
we’re working with a terrific band called The Dovekins from Denver, and among the tunes we’re doing, i’ve written a couple! this is a blog about making things, so here we go!
1. something triumphant, but i won’t tell you what it’s for, that’d spoil the suprise
2. game show theme! (this is played live, but here’s a quick midi version)
3. theme for the winner of the show! by myself and mr. tabakin. (also demo version)
4. crash! (foley)
5. industrial smelting sound design
and these four little guys, that we didn’t end up using in the final version of the show:
1. so, i’ve been writing a lot lately for one thing or another and it caused me at some point to go back through some old stuff. this was fun. i havn’t listened to many of the “song a week” tracks in a while, and there were some tracks that didn’t get posted during that time. i think i was looking for examples of orchestral writing for a client recently, and came upon something i titled “LOST” when i wrote it. i figured out that this track was originally part of the “floyd” series i made a couple of years ago, but had been cut for one reason or another. upon listening now, i was both pleased with the writing in many ways, and embarrassed by the samples/sounds/realism.
note: it can be tough to make realistic orchestral sounds from synthesized instruments, and this is a good example.
2. i just finished a track for Tour de Fat 2010, for which i’m a music director, and it’s a track i’m pretty happy with, both in its character and it’s realism. (but YOU tell ME!). so this made me think about my writing/recording now, as apposed to a few years ago, and i came up with this thought:
i think i still wrote interesting stuff, but stuff that was distractingly “fake” sounding. now, this may still be true, as most of the instruments in track 2 are “fake”, but now they are better sounding (more realistic) fake sounds.
mind you, the character of the pieces are different, but it’s interesting to me to think of them as time-pieces, both in the writing and the production.
this may or may not be interesting to anyone but me, but thanks for listening, mom.
that’s right! it’s Steinomite! i’ve created a rap character for my upcoming RAP CAREER and i’ve now posted the most recent track, entitled “The Sunset.”
Johnny Amazing performed live last night with Chicago sketch group Teenager of the Year!
The show apparently had half the room in stitches and half the room pissed. i’d call that a success!!
this show required johnny amazing to perform the Top Gun Theme live, multiple times, so i made a karaoke version of the song that just repeats the main riff, transposing up at each repeat. to be between 3 and 4 minutes long and cover the necessary range on the guitar, i went up a minor third every time.
LISTEN HERE!
i ended up making 4 or 5 versions of this for the live show, including a funky dancetime curtain call
LISTEN HERE!
WARNING – this theme might be rolling around in your head all day, but you’ve prolly known that since the 80′s.
