myxprojekt - et cetera

Train Talk (stream | download)

In the mid-1990s my day job involved long train commutes. Tiring of reading and doing puzzles, I bought a Yamaha QY20 (shown at left) so I could do some music sequencing and composing while I was stuck on the train. The first piece I did was Train Talk, a little pop ditty very much in the style of mid-1980s Scritti Politti. All I used was the little QY20, nothing else. I recorded the piece to a DAT tape and filed it away. After using the QY20 for about nine months I got too fed up with the fiddly user interface and abandoned it altogether. It got sucked into the morass of my basement studio and hasn't seen the light of day in over a decade.

While going through things in the basement the other day, I stumbled on the QY20. Curious to see if it still worked, I put in some batteries and fired it up. Amazingly, the sequences were still intact and the Train Talk track played flawlessly. I decided to transfer the MIDI sequences, track by track, into Reason and do up a definitive mix of the piece. I sampled the QY20 sound used for the main melody of the piece because I quite liked its character; for all the other parts, I simulated the remaining QY20 sounds using the synths and samplers available in the Reason rack. Although I took advantage of some of the extra production facilities in Reason not available in the QY20, every effort has been made to retain the feel and flavor of the original version.

Thirteen (stream | download)

This one goes waaaaay back, to a time when the Mahavishnu Orchestra was in its heyday and I was a fanatic follower of the group. I took a stab at the genre they pioneered with this little homage. The original recording was done on a four track reel-to-reel recorder with piano and monophonic synth - it sounded, well, kinda squinky even though it was faithful to the genre. I don't know what happened to that recording (the reel may well be in my archives, I haven't come across it yet) but I've held that tune in my mind for my entire adult life. I always wanted to do a version that came much closer to the sound and feel of that particular flavor of early '70s jazz/rock, so when Reason came along I started work on a remake. The new version here is certainly less squinky sounding, but in all honesty it suffers a bit from my having programmed 13/8 drum loops in lieu of a real drummer and my soloing chops are merely passable. Re-kindling a relationship with Jeff Drucker, a keyboardist with chops up the yinyang and a hankering to master Reason himself, may result in a new version of this song with a better lead line solo ... but for now this one will have to do.

Crazy Frog: The Leonids (stream | download)

I started work on a D'n'B tune in November 2001, called The Leonids (named for the Leonids meteor shower, which took place the night I started work on the tune). I got it half done, put it away for a while, and pulled it out every couple of months or so for more tweaking and refinements.

Then I stumbled on this hilarious recording on an Insanity Test web page during the summer of 2002. The recording is famous now (see the Wikipedia entry for "Crazy Frog"), but at the time I had no idea where it came from. All I knew is it was the funniest thing I ever heard and thought it would be cool to use it in a tune at some point. I captured the audio from the web page and filed it away for future reference.

Another year or two passed before I got the idea to work the Insanity audio into my D'n'B tune, which has since gone through several more refinements. It is an unreleased tune and will probably remain so, since I had no idea until early in 2006 that in the intervening time Daniel's recording had become a commercial phenomenon (I was late to that particular party) and I have no idea what it would take to negotiate the rights to Daniel's audio at this point. I humbly offer it to Crazy Frog fans everywhere in the hope that it puts a smile on the face of everyone who hears it.

Props go to ace drummer Mark Vollenweider, who provided the core percussion performance on which this song was built.

Doing Agatha:
Movie Soundtrack (view realplayer trailer)

Through a strange and circuitous series of circumstances, I got the opportunity to provide soundtrack music for the low-budget comedy/mystery "Doing Agatha." The soundtrack is a combination of original orchestral music cues and orchestral realizations of segments from Holst's "The Planets" suite and Prokoffiev's "Cinderella" ballet, as well as a few music cues in other genres.

I completed this work in mid-2006. At present, the filmmakers are still fine-tuning the edit of the film. I'm not sure when this film will see the light of day, but even if it doesn't, the experience of producing this soundtrack music was interesting and challenging: it was my first attempt at producing acoustic orchestral music using a laptop and software. (Oh, and for the Holst and Prokoffiev segments, I did not work from a score - I reproduced the orchestractions from actual recordings by ear.) Judging from the reactions of the filmmakers and the cast and crew members who have seen the film, the experiment was a iresounding success.