For the first time in a long time, Thanksgiving break offered an uninterrupted half week of free time. I used a lot of it to revisit some musicals I hadn\u2019t worked on in a while. I submitted my first musical, a couple years old now, to a festival and will hear back about it during winter break. But I also made progress on a short musical now almost three years in the making.<\/p>\n
For a bit of background, I composed a ninety-minute musical in high school with my brother, which I was lucky enough to see performed as a staged reading. We started collaborating on another musical after that which was going to be full length but we trimmed it to a short, basically sung-through musical in keeping with my brother\u2019s one-act play on which it is based.<\/p>\n
I wrote many of the songs my freshman year of college and continued to add and tweak them basically until now. To perform\u00a0it, the show would have to be scored or recorded somehow, and I didn\u2019t\u00a0have time\u00a0to assemble another full piano vocal score like I did for the\u00a0first\u00a0one (while certainly an experience, it is extremely time consuming). So this time,\u00a0I decided to look into some digital recording, which would not only handle a lot of the scoring for me but would also allow me to quickly orchestrate the piece for more than just piano.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d forgotten how entertaining digital recording\u00a0is. In fact, I got so wrapped up in marveling at\u00a0what my computer instruments could do that I quickly went\u00a0\u00a0too far and produced some very complicated orchestrations. They say less is more with most orchestrations, but each song was\u00a0a tad\u00a0fast and a tad too dramatic, especially compared to most other arrangements\u00a0I’ve heard.\u00a0Of course, the anecdotal feedback I\u2019ve\u00a0received on my music\u00a0is\u00a0that my songs\u00a0are\u00a0already\u00a0very energetic pieces and I need\u00a0some mellower ones. What can I say \u2013 I\u2019m a sucker for drama.<\/p>\n
In any case, they made for some\u00a0rather\u00a0entertaining demo tracks, and\u00a0since\u00a0they\u2019re just song demos, I’ll\u00a0have plenty of time to polish them. At least I\u00a0have\u00a0started recording my second show. And even though I hadn’t composed anything new in a while, I was quickly getting accustomed to the formerly mysterious world of computer orchestration.<\/p>\n
Then, just as I thought I had no more song ideas, a flurry came to me out of nowhere. That\u2019s not entirely true \u2013 I\u2019d been working on a ten-minute musical but hadn\u2019t figured out how to put it together, and finally I came up with an outline for several different songs and an opening number. I guess hearing some new instruments and sounds was enough to get back into the swing of composing again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the first time in a long time, Thanksgiving break offered an uninterrupted half week of free time. I used a lot of it to revisit some musicals I hadn\u2019t worked on in a while. I submitted my first musical, … Continue reading