The game is finally up and available to play! I'm hoping I'll have the OST up on youtube in the next couple of hours too.
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Hey everyone! I'm working on music for a game jam this weekend. Tracks to be posted to youtube when it's all said and done. For now check out the link here for more information!
I can't believe it's been so long since I posted anything! I am still alive in case anyone is still reading the blog. A lot of what I've been working on is still in the 'work in progress' stage and it's been a rough two years so there hasn't been very much to share. However I'm very happy to announce that I just finished writing the music for a production of Alice in Wonderland!
Details can be found here. If you're in the Chicagoland area check it out. I should be there on opening night and look forward to seeing how my music is being utilized. I haven't had any opportunity to see the show yet so we're all in for a surprise together! If you've been following me for a while you'll notice some old themes being used in the show. Stuff that I originally wrote without any purpose and that I'm glad finally is getting used in the sort of live show setting I wanted. There are some new things though too, particularly a version of the Lobster Quadrille that I'm particularly fond of. You can check out a sneak peak on both my YouTube and Soundcloud channels respectively. Yup, it's totally getting old, but I am still alive despite not saying anything for basically a year. I've been working frantically on finishing the soundtrack for the game I was working on and I'm just not good at communicating when busy. Combine that with some family members having bad health problems and well I'm sure a lot of you know how that goes...
The good news is the soundtrack is finished and just waiting on the actual game to be done! I'm so excited about this project. The guy who is designing it is so talented and clever. I'm probably going to burst from excitement waiting for the finished project. The only problem I have is I am absolutely abysmal at platformers! This may be a case where I have to have the boyfriend do the playing while I watch. Thankfully my sense of determination is usually high enough that I keep going so I'm only going to feel a little guilty when I give up hopefully lol. Otherwise I will (as usual) try to be more proactive about posting things. The plan is to get back into my game series so there will at least be some let's playing going on. I'll post more about that on the education side of things. Until then hope to talk everyone again soon! I should clarify, live audio recording outside of a studio setting is terrible. I had an idea for the game I'm working on that recording real live car sounds and then playing with them would make really cool 'spaceship' sounds. Unfortunately I am finding it to be exceedingly annoying.
Partially this is my own lazy fault. I had it in my mind that if I was going to destroy the sound quality anyway I could use my iPhone to record initially. However, this has proven to be an epic disaster as I accidentally recorded everything as mpeg 4 files. For the live of me I can't get them to convert properly despite reading up on how to do it. The saddest part however, is despite devising an idiotic way to work around it my end solution has been to just use a pile of VSTs overlayed with each other and adding a few odd effects in...and it sounds a heck of a lot better. So what is the point of this mad rant? Well I guess the point is that I've learned the hard way that some things are not better off live and there's no reason to reinvent the wheel when embarking on a project. Life is hard enough and takes up enough time without making extra work for yourself. Today I'm going to be doing something a little out of the norm for me, reviewing a country concert! Particularly, Alan Jackson at Ravinia. I'm not personally against country music (if I'm being honest I really generally like ALL music), but I haven't had the opportunity to go to a lot of country concerts so I was not quite sure what to expect. This particular show was a birthday present for my best girl (my mom!) who is a huge Alan Jackson fan. As a result, I'm a pretty big Alan Jackson fan via lifetime exposure, since I have been listening to his music for a really long time. Hopefully Mr. Jackson will take that as a compliment rather than a commentary on how long he's been in the business. Which is how it should be, because despite being his 25th anniversary tour, I found his show to be hugely entertaining and not just because I got a sequinned, LED cowgirl hat by going. So on to the show itself.
Opening act was Kelsea Ballerini, who I had not recognized by name but recognized when I heard her singing "Love Me Like you Mean it" which has been on the radio a lot lately. Ms. Ballerini, at 21, is still very young in the business and you can sort of tell. Primarily in that she doesn't quite have the easy confidence that she'll have after a few more tours. To be fair though, she did sound sick when she was talking with the audience. This is one of the major reasons I was quite impressed with her. Despite decidedly sounding 'under the weather' when speaking she did a very fine job of keeping herself in tune and in sync with her bandmates. I would be interested to hear her live when she is at the top of her game. She also has a decidedly more modern pop/country fair that Alan Jackson which made it an interesting pairing. There were some older listeners seated around me who complained rather heavily about how 'country isn't country anymore.' Since I'm decidedly into fusion music this doesn't bother me much. In addition, her songs are decidedly more 'youthful' in their scope, for example, one song is about how much freer life felt when she was 'underage.' It makes me laugh just a little to think that I'm part of the old crowd now. Being underage is so far back in my past I can barely remember it any more! In the end I'm glad she was there and walked home with a new CD that I've been listening to and fro from work. And then on to the main event. I think Alan Jackson's portion of the evening can be summarized in just one phrase: damn, can this guy sing. Some things really do get better with age and experience. I can without a doubt say that he's a great live singer. If I didn't know better I would almost think he was being dubbed over (one or two little wobbles and mic spikes let me know it's all real). Spot on clean and clear sounding voice, just like on the records. But singing doesn't save the show. A great act needs humor and entertainment too. Well, that won't be a problem either as he did a great job engaging with the crowd with jokes and stories spanning his entire career. My only two complaints of the evening are as follows: 1.) There were a few technical issues, mostly mic spikes. Not unexpected at a live show, but they happened. 2.) The lawn crowd was terrible. I'm used to mosh pits so I knew it was going to be a bit of a different listening situation but really I have never seen anything like it before. I don't know if this was because the Ravinia crowd is just more restrained than I am used to or it was an odd group. I did see Christian Kane a few years back at Joe's Bar in Chicago and that show at the level of cheering and hooliganism I expected so I don't know what was wrong here. The people who could afford seating in the main 'shell' theater seemed to be having a loud riotous time too, so again, I am confused by the lack of enthusiasm in the lawn crowd. While there was an adorable couple in front of us who would randomly get up and dance otherwise there was barely even any clapping. My greatest disappointment of the night however was the rather unpleasant old couple behind me who complained so bitterly about my glowing LED cowgirl hat that I turned it off. Now I would have been a little less annoyed about it if Ravinia had said no hats, but they were the ones selling them! So I bought my super cheesy hat and didn't even get to wear it for the majority of the concert. On the flip side there was a funny pair of pair of guys next to us who shouted, not too subtly, that it was 'a terrible thing that SOME PEOPLE had to ruin the fun for the rest of them,' which did make the evil part of me chuckle a bit. I think Mr. Jackson would have found it amusing too in my defense. My parting words are this: Please come back to Ravinia soon! My mom and I would love to listen and I would love an excuse to wear my hat again! Greetings and good afternoon internet!
I think I may just have to come to terms with the fact that I am notoriously terrible at communication and outreach. I will still constantly apologize but it's something I'm that always seems to fall to the wayside when I get inundated with new projects. Which is exactly what I have been up to recently! In addition to my paneling work, I've been busy helping out with the creation of the game Binary Shred. More about the game itself can be found here and I encourage everyone to check it out! I'm really excited to be part of this project as writing music for a game has been one of my life goals for quite a while now. Thus far it has absolutely been everything I could have dreamed of. The soundtrack has allowed me to experiment with techno/8bit/classical fusion sounds in a way I haven't done before. I always work better when I have time pressure on me as well so having someone else remind me I have a deadline to meet (even in the nicest way possible) is critical for me to be efficient. This efficiency has helped combat some of my natural negativity and depression as well. Win win! The overall effect I'm going for is somewhere along the lines of if the Megaman Soundtrack had a baby with the Mass Effect 1 soundtrack and produced a child who liked Lisa Gerard's work in Gladiator. Which seems like an odd mix at times but that was sort of the point for me. While a soundtrack at its base still has to be good, what separates a good soundtrack from an okay one is realizing how to mesh your style as a composer with the style and aesthetic of the game. While my natural inclination is towards dark and classically driven work, in a game about generally adorable robots I have to make sure the music feels like it is informing the audience of something. I don't want my soundtrack to just be background noise. I want it to inform the audience and clue them into emotions they may not realize they need to be feeling. ...which sounds a little pretensions when I type it like that but I always tell my students to aim high. I can't expect anything less of myself in my own work. As of right now, I'm holding off on releasing samples until the game is closer to being finished but I hope my descriptions have peaked your interest at least a bit! As usual, I am painfully slow about uploading and updating things on my website. Rest assured that convention photos from both ACEN and Anime Midwest should be making an appearance on the site this week as well as some updated news on new music I am working on. Until then however, I will be busy making sure the music gets finished and the photos collected from my camera and my boyfriends camera.
Phew! It sure has been a busy year so far!
Again, despite my alarming inability to post at regular intervals I finally have an initial version of my Last Fantasy Suite for Symphonic Band. This piece has been a long time coming, almost a year in fact at this point. I started this journey by volunteering to write a piece for middle school level band at a school I had previous taught at. Not only did it seem like a fun experience to be able to write for students whom I had developed a strong relationship with it also seemed like an important personal challenge since I have very little first hand experience with band instruments. With these thoughts in mind I jumped ahead into the planning stage. I decided early on that I wanted to put together a medley of tunes I had composed for a video game that never got finished. This was important to me partially because they seemed like they would transcribe well for middle schoolers and partially because it celebrated my love of video games, something that the student know about me. Thus it worked out on a personal and professional level. And then the hard part came. I realized very quickly that limited experience with band instruments was a very generous way of putting it. Basically I sucked at transpositions when I was a music student and sucked at it still as a young professional. On top of that I needed to constantly check in on instrument ranges and what ranges were typically playable by young musicians on top of that! And please don’t even get me started on the idiosyncrasies of percussion notation…I think I may perish! Even after the notation process was over it seemed to be one error after another with the DAWs. Basically the easy man’s version is that I really need more firepower on my computer to process 18 high CPU demanding instruments at the same time. (The more technically version is I’m pretty sure I’m spiking my CPU due to a lack of RAM, which since I don’t have ports available for that it’s probably upgrading time). The result was that I processed my instruments in groups of 4. While I tried to do my best to make it mix and line up okay frankly it is probably one of my worst mixed pieces. At some point I’ll have to probably remaster it but for now it serves its purpose. It’s been an incredible journey and thank you to everyone who has followed me on it and encouraged me in spite of my infrequent posts. You can check it out on my sound cloud here. It will be up on youtube at some point. I’ll be honest, I’m kinda hungry and will probably put it off till later. :) It's been very nice to get back to composing however I wish today's post could have been inspired by happier times. Despite having other musical plans originally, when the announcement came earlier this week that RWBY animator Monty Oum had passed away I knew right away that the world had lost a creative powerhouse and I needed to do something. In lieu of flowers, individuals were encouraged to utilize their creativity and imagination to create their own works. Therefore, I am presenting “In Lieu of Flowers: Nynia’s Lament” in tribute to Monty Oum.
The main theme in Nynia’s theme is especially important to me because it is one of the first pieces I ever wrote. I originally conceived of this piece in high school but simply didn’t have the technology or skill in mixing and recording to put it together the way I envisioned. I was very inspired during the original composing process by the works of Howard Shore in the Lord of the Rings which is probably the reason for the ‘Elven’ tone to the piece. In my mind, Nynia represented everything beautiful and ethereal about the Elves in Tolkien’s work. I’ve tried several times to ‘remaster’ it without success. Somehow this week it flowed very naturally. Now I am proud to present to you this fully realized version. Completely recorded and mixed in 3 days, this piece utilizes the following VSTs: Spitfire Audio: Enigma, Albion II: Loegria, Albion III: Iceni, Burgess Percussion Redux, Orchestral Grand Piano Cinesamples: Cinewinds Pro The piece also features three part vocals all recorded by myself. Unlike my usual process where I would start with Finale and write music for Nynia I started by improvising all three vocal lines based on the original simple 8 note melody I crafted years ago. Then those vocal lines were combined and put into FL Studio where I added (again mostly improvised) all the background instrumentals. I used to do a lot of improvised music but since most contests and ensembles require sheet music I had not done a lot of improve music for a bit. Despite the somber mood while creating this piece, the improvisational elements of the work proved to be very relaxing. I may have to play around with some more ambient improvised pieces in the future. To Monty Oum, wherever you are, I know you are inspiring and creating just as you did during your time on Earth. Thank you for guiding my hand and voice during this week and I hope you are as pleased with the results as I am. You can hear it on SoundCloud here. There should be a version on Youtube as well soon. It's just taking a longer than usual time to process. I will include the link when it is working. |
Nocturnal Adagio
Music and musings by Sarah Hsi. For more info check out my About Me page. Archives
March 2018
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