Wanderlust

It sometimes takes me a while these days to unpack my experience of a trip, the impressions, the things that changed me, and articulate it into a story.  And this blog, while it's been a chronicle of my time in New York City, has also allowed me an outlet for these kinds of stories.  The kinds of stories I've discovered that I love telling.  And perhaps that's why I started to travel again.  I've always had a bit of wanderlust ever since my parents dragged me (I say that lovingly...I was not really dragged) on a trip around the country at the tender yet excitable age of 8.  I've thirsted since to see more of the world.  When asked what I wanted for a graduation present from high school, without hesitation, I said a trip to Paris.

Fast forward to this year.  The fact that there is a festival called Wanderlust seemed like a no brainer. Yet, it was a friend who suggested we go and, therefore, not my idea.  A few months ago in the course of a twenty minute phone conversation, the plan was hatched.  This July, Snowmass Village, Colorado was hosting the festival.  I hadn't been to Colorado since that fateful trip as a wide-eyed eight year old. We rode the Durango to Silverton railroad and I gazed at canyons and roaring rivers out the window of the train, noticing only at the end of the trip how much soot had accumulated on my face.  In Silverton, I gestured toward snowy mountains and begged my parents to hike up so we could see snow in June.  My siblings laughed at my inability to judge distance. Here's me with the brakeman's hat on:

When my friend told me that the Wanderlust festival was in Colorado, I bit almost immediately.  A yoga festival? In Colorado? Of course!

So we began planning, reserved a rental car, and agreed on an AirBnb in Basalt, a town about thirty minutes away, to save money.  And I began getting excited about things like Acro Yoga and Stand-up Paddleboard Yoga (the classes were all full by the time we had bought out tickets unfortunately so I didn't get to try it) and Slackline Yoga, farm to table dinners, hiking and meditation in nature, as well as the fact that there would be music every night.  Outdoor music.  And then they sent out an email after we bought our tickets saying that freakin' Moby was headlining the festival!

Here's an album of photos from the festival.  There's so much to say about the festival so I'll just talk highlights and forego the blow by blow.  Probably one of the most inspiring moments of the festival for me was the meditation hike with Häana, a violinist who came to the festival as one of the performers. Her music was really awesome. She actually almost carpooled with us from Denver International Airport but her flight kept getting delayed. I had researched her when she answered my post on the Wanderlust Facebook page offering rides from Denver to other festival goers.

On the second day of the festival I got a chance to hear her play a full electronic set at one of the indoor meditation classes. That alone was amazing and really freaking cool.  But on this hike, she brought an old vintage violin that had this amazingly beautiful resonance.  We hiked a little ways into the Aspen groves where she led a brief meditation and while we continued to sit in the tall grasses, she improvised for about twenty minutes in a Norwegian influenced style. As the music swelled, the breeze tickled us and a small thunderstorm rolled in.  Just being out there in the open air, feeling the breeze, and hearing the haunting sounds of that violin.  It was so beautiful.  There are a couple good pics from the hike in that album as well as a video I took after hanging back on the hike down (you can hear the thunder in the background!)

Another spectacular moment was trying out Acro yoga for the first time and getting up in a handstand while balancing on another person's knees while they laid on the ground.  All the pics in that album where you see the dome tents set up is where we had all of those classes.  There were some other types of specialized yoga that happened there, but that I didn't get to try, like AiREAL yoga which has you balancing in fabric hammocks, doing moves meant to decompress the spine and strengthen your core.  There was also Slackline yoga which is essentially doing yoga on a tight rope.  The guy who did carpool with us from the airport was huge into this and my friend who came with me tried a few classes (she was also into the Hula classes which were a big thing).  My only attempt at slack-lining was after having a few drinks when it was late at night and dark out.  It did not go well.

Other highlights were of course all of the concerts, including Moby and the Wanderlust Spectacular, a full show of acrobatics and dancing that had my jaw dropping the whole time.  Then there was hanging out in Aspen on my last night with a local I'd met on my first night there and then having her show us around her town of Carbondale on our final day after the festival had ended.  Our AirBnb host even joined us at a local distillery there called Marble Distillery and then we all had dinner at a place called Town.  I tried rabbit tacos and they were excellent!

I gotta tell you, on a side note, the elevation up there did not kill me but it was certainly a bit harder to walk uphill while simultaneously making conversation with the new friends I was making.  And it took far fewer flights of stairs than normal for me to be winded.  But that was all okay because I've heard what altitude sickness can be like and I would much prefer just having a little difficulty breathing to that any day.

Anyway, now that I'm back, and I've made friends out there, I plan on going back in September and hiking one of the 14ers.  Because lately, I've been obsessed with tall mountains and the like.  See my previous trip to Nicaragua in February.  And I'm not worried about the elevation gain because I know I'll probably acclimate in the first few days and the peak my friend has recommended only has like a 4,200 ft. elevation gain.  Concepción was 5,200 ft. tall and I hiked that one from the bottom in 4 1/2 hours.

And before any of this I was planning on going to Peru to hike Huayna Picchu, the peak next to the Machu Picchu ruins.  But that trip may have to wait because my girlfriend and I are talking fairly seriously about hitting up Dominica in the Caribbean, an island I zeroed in on and then was sold on the moment I realized that it boasts one of the tallest mountain peaks in the Caribbean Islands.  Morne Diablotins at 4,700 ft.  So, there will be more stories of surmounting formidable peaks.

And speaking of which, metaphoric peaks are still in the works as well.  But it's a bit slower going on those.  I'll just say for now that I'm still working at doing voice over for CNN whenever they'll throw it my way and I have plans to build up a reel with that material.  Occasionally, my voice coach will throw me an audition or two.  And as for my most recent music outlet, I'm jamming with two new friends now.  Collaborating for the first time in a very long time.

The only other bit of news I got as far as music goes is that I got a statement in the mail from Medianet, showing that The Life has been generating me royalties.  The number is so low, though, I'm not even gonna tell you how much so far.  But hey.  Gotta start somewhere.

The rules of troubleshooting...

Just a quick one before I head to bed.  Yeah, I did it.  I opted to try and work late at night instead of working on changing my bed time routine.  The crappy thing is that I might have been productive if I hadn't needed to troubleshoot some problems first.

I was about to sit down and tinker with some piano ideas using my MIDI controller through Logic and one of my piano samplers but the stupid M Audio Axiom keyboard that I use has this problem where, all of a sudden, when you turn it on, two notes (usually an augmented fourth apart, i.e. C and F#) just don't work.  So, before, I had found that all you had to do was just turn the thing off hold down the offending keys and then turn it back on and hold them down for 30 seconds.  Okay, so a lot of trial and error and reading forums led to that and I'm still not even sure if what I did was what worked to fix it or if it fixed itself or if some random hit of the keys jostled the electronics and put something back in place.  It's ineffable.  Because this time around it's A and D# that aren't working and my fix that I was so proud of is not working either.

I needed a win tonight so, I shifted gears (all while still sipping my glass of wine) and started to work on a hunch about what was wrong with my looping software Mobius.  This is going to become one of my favorite rules of troubleshooting: "Ask yourself what has changed since the problem started."

Duh.  I got a new audio interface about a month or so ago and hadn't yet tried it out with my guitar setup and, over the past few days, I was tinkering a little and noticed a problem with Mobius.  Usually the screen will animate, so you know what state it's in, whether recording, overdubbing, playing back etc. But this time around when I'd tap the buttons on my pedal, it would move and freeze and only when you interacted with the program again, whether clicking on the screen somewhere or tapping another button, would it actually update.

So this is a problem when you're performing because you want to know what's going on and what state it's in, and whether the pedal tap you just executed actually did anything.

But, when I had that eureka moment about the change in my audio interface, I decided to try the old audio interface out.  Sure enough, it worked fine.  Well, sort of.  It worked fine as a standalone but I usually use it in MainStage, Apple's live performance software that allows me to add all kinds of effects and have multiple channels that I can mix live.  In MainStage it was having the same problem.  So I had to tinker more and I think I've found a workaround but I have to test it more.  I basically have to go through a series of weird steps to get it to work correctly, which is frustrating enough but then add in that normally, I have to turn things on in a certain order and sometimes have to restart the computer so that one piece of software will recognize all the bits of hardware I have plugged in.

So, anyway, I feel somewhat accomplished tonight but it's all still underscored by the fact that my jobs are still coming so few and far between that when I go to dive into my work and dust off certain programs and pieces of hardware, I realize that I almost always have to fix some problem before I can even get started.    That is pretty frustrating.  All I wanted to do tonight was play some keyboard and riff a little.  Now I have to wait until Friday morning/afternoon when I can bang on my piano and think something up.

Happily, said piano was most recently banged on by the inimitable Crystal Bright just this morning before she left, showing me a new piece of hers.  Perhaps she will have imbued it with some of her creative energy.

Before I forget though, here's a little riff that I was toying with the other day and put up on SoundCloud.  Enjoy!

Back to life, back to reality...

Update: I most certainly did not make my connecting flight in Miami.  I might have, had I not bought a bottle of rum at the duty free shop that I was told had to be checked when I got to Miami. Can't carry on duty free liquids, Tim.  

Our flight leaving Managua was delayed over an hour due to late arrival of the aircraft so by the time I got to Miami and through customs, it was far too late for me to check the bag with the rum in it on the flight...I would have made it perhaps but my bag wouldn't have.  So I grudgingly threw out the rum, but the added time that I spent debating what to do about that before ultimately throwing it out screwed me over and for the first time in my life, I arrived at the gate as they were closing the doors.  Worst feeling ever.  I wound up getting on the very next flight but not before calling American Airlines and trying to get on the last one of the evening because I was under the impression, as per one of my friends testimonies, that that next flight was indeed full. (She had changed her flight while still in Nicaragua...something I didn't think to do because I checked in online and did not know the flight leaving Managua was delayed until I arrived at the gate and after I had bought the damn bottle of rum.)  

The flight, the 8:35 to LGA, was not full, but finding this out took me calling the rebooking hotline, finding out I was on the stand-by list for the 9:10 to JFK (the final one of the evening), setting up a flight for the next day just in case I couldn't get on, actually going to the gate for the 9:10 and then having the gate agent tell me I was already confirmed for the 8:35 flight and that I just had to run over there and get them to give me a seat.  

My friends all had to wait for their baggage to go through customs and then recheck their bags so they probably knew sooner than I did that they weren't making our original flight, the 7:15.  Trying not to still be upset about the bottle of 7 year Flor de Caña Rum, I realized I probably could have saved it if I'd just kept my head and accepted I was going to miss my flight instead of stupidly trying to make it.  

Anyway, as I walked around the other day, doing errands, my thoughts turned to it again and, as I looked up, there happened to be a liquor store right across the street from me.  And they carried that same brand of rum...only just the 4 year bottle.  It'll do.  

What won't do, however, is this @#$!ing snow.  It took vacationing in the middle of winter in a tropical place and coming back to a snow storm to make me finally hate snow.  I found myself trudging through it and thinking how it felt the same as trudging through sand...if I closed my eyes...and imagining I was still on that beach.    

The shock to my system is pretty intense and I'm just now coming around, as I think I got gluten-ed on the way back, in addition. Stomach no like-y.  Even felt feverish.  Could have something to do, as well, with the 70 degree drop in temperature.  

At any rate, I got back in the swing of things today, calling in sick today from TruTV, actually meditating (taking things learned from the trip into account) and doing yoga at home, rocking out some voice over auditions and doing some laundry to clean sheets, soaked by the leak in my ceiling...above my bed.  Yeah, that happened.  New York apartment living.  FML.  

I'm almost back at 100% but still feeling bummed.  What should make me happy though is that I still have a few prospects to apply myself toward.  Another film music/theme composing opportunity has come into my sights.  While I was away I got an email from a friend about an opportunity she heard about, so I've already contacted that person and now I wait.  Also, the friend for whom I composed years ago and who is now editing a feature length film, should be finishing the edit soon so I'm trying to keep on him.  

So, lots to occupy my mind.  Unfortunately, nothing to report yet.  Just winter doldrums and such.  I thought I saw more single digits on the weather forecast.  Ugh.  Gotta run for now.  

Shock to the system...

In 5 days I'll be on a flight to a foreign country with some mosquito spray, sunscreen, summer clothes and a yoga mat.  I've been getting myself psyched by reading weather reports for Nicaragua and wondering how much of a shock to my system a 75 degree difference in temperature will be.  No, it's not even that it's going to be all that hot in Nicarague (mid 80s for highs, mid 60s for lows...all. week. long).  If you're reading this and you're in the U.S. right now, there's a good chance you already know how cold it is in most parts of the country.  This cold snap has been at the forefront of conversation and news reporting for the better part of a week and, while it is annoying that some people still have to be told that weather is not climate and that a single cold weather event does not negate global climate change, I'm more focused on just getting through it for the prize awaiting me at the end.  And since I obviously don't need my summer clothes at the moment, I took the liberty of starting to pack a suitcase with them. I seriously cannot wait.

As of today, I know a few more facts about this trip, as per a recent email from the organizers:  there are 8 people coming on the trip, myself included, minus the two teachers; only one of them is a guy besides myself; and we're all going to be on the same flight from Miami to Managua.  Tomorrow morning, I'm going to the 9:30 yoga class with one of the teachers who's leading the retreat, so maybe I'll meet some of the others then.

When I get back home tomorrow, I have until 2:30 to sort out a handful of other things related to the trip; calling the banks to let them know I'll be using my bank card in another country, calling the airline to make sure things like my gluten free in-flight meal for the return trip are sorted out, and various other errands. I really haven't thought of much else this week besides that...and organizing my iTunes library now that I have an iPhone.  That was a surprise...8 refurbished phones in a row that all went south on me and Verizon finally offers me an early upgrade (almost didn't approve it after the fact too, which pissed me off).  I have a few other gadgets related to said iPhone coming in the mail and I'm hoping they'll show up before I have to leave on Sunday.  One of them is a much needed case, another is a solar powered battery pack.  Perfect for the trip...but not terribly necessary.

I swear, planning a trip is one of my favorite parts of traveling.   Learning about a new place, finding out what's to do and see there.  The anticipation building until the day you leave, the slight nervousness that you'll forget something or oversleep the day of your flight.   All of this has reawakened a sense of adventure in me that I'd almost forgotten I had.  Sure, moving to New York was adventurous...but this is a whole different kind of adventure.

So, yeah, not much else is going on except the excitement of the Nicaragua trip until tonight when I got an email with the newest cut of the full length trailer for "The Life."  It's looking good so far and I'm psyched to hit the ground running when the episode is finally ready for scoring.  Not sure how long that'll be but I know that if this round of edits of the trailer passes with everyone on the production team, then the editor will move on to cutting and re-cutting the episode.

As much as I'm going to enjoy this trip, it will be nice to get back into a routine in a few weeks and really start working.  As previously stated, I've not really bothered to get back to work since the start of the new year.  I've made a few to do lists and done some heavy thinking about my approach but purposefully gave myself a break between my holiday travel and this trip so that I could really focus when I got back.  And so I could really truly relax next week.  I've had to actually reassure myself multiple times that it's okay to take a break.  I'm still trying not to think about how long it's been since I've submitted a voice over audition.

But there'll come a time for all that, when I get back here to the city, refreshed, slightly more tan, having deepened my yoga practice and cleared my head with a week full of meditative quiescence.   For now, I sleep...and dream of tropical weather while the wind howls outside my apartment.

Things I need to do...

It's late.  Ha!  It's always late when I'm writing these entries.  Shut up Tim and tell them about what's going on.  Anyway, I was just reminiscing and reading an entry from last year on this exact date (well, yesterday's date now).  For some reason I had a hunch there'd be some insight there.  I do this sometimes. I don't just re-read to reminisce but to gain perspective.  And sure enough, I was talking about making lists and my approach to starting tasks and allowing them to remain fluid so that I can alter my course once I get a clearer picture of what it will take to complete said tasks.  This also hearkens back to a more recent blog in the past few weeks where I was talking about the science of procrastination. 

When I wrote the more recent blog, I hadn't yet gone back and read the first one I linked and now I realize that, seriously, I was right in the second more recent blog....a lot of this stuff is innate.

That said, I know January is over a month away but regrouping at year's end and making to-do lists for the new year is on my mind again.  And starting projects, actually getting my ass moving again on a lot of things, is also on my mind.  So glad I re-read my blog about just getting started and being flexible with my approach to various tasks.

The things I need to do:

I've been thinking a lot about the licensing agency and how, since about a year has passed since they received my first batch of tracks and I haven't heard anything, I might need to increase my output to them.  I've also been thinking a lot about how these voice over practice sessions my coach has been organizing are really bringing out some great reads and I'm feeling much more confident (especially around other VO actors...I'd truly be interested in studying the psychology behind why a person seems to feel more confident in groups versus with individuals or even more confident with some individuals versus others...but that's another blog entry).  Indeed, some of these reads I'm producing at the practice sessions are worthy of going on the commercial demo which needs constant attention, of course.  But what else do they need?  You guessed it: Music.  But wait, I need to write some new music for the licensing agency anyway!

About a week ago, I took a look at all the products of my riffing over the course of the last year and selected which ones I could turn something into.  I was going to just systematically produce one after the other to completion but now, I realize it might be a fun project to just listen to the best reads that I've put out from those practice sessions and focus on writing music specifically for them.

Every previous run I've taken at improving my demos always felt rushed.  I would just go through my library of unused tracks and grab the closest thing.  But now, I can see how both avenues would benefit from me taking the time to essentially produce these ads from the ground up.  Writing music specifically for them would both give me the experience of composing for an ad again and would leave me with a finished product I could use on the voice over demos and that I could send to the licensing agency.

So there's the goal and I now have a starting point.  It's time to organize my thoughts on that one and project how long it would take me to get this done.  The idea is that it'll get me started with two, maybe 3, 30 second music bumps that I could also extend to 60 second versions that would both go on the VO demo and go to the licensing agency (remember it's a non-exclusive contract).  And then I would have the momentum, in theory to compose a few more and by early next year I could be sending a few more off to the agency and would already have a new commercial demo in hand.

Sound good?  I hope so.  That's all the eureka I can muster right now. I'm about a day away from being off for four days and I'm mentally checked out of about every other endeavor that isn't music or voice over right now.  And off for four days during which I do not have to travel anywhere.  All I have to do is bake another gluten free pumpkin pie and truck my ass out to Bushwick without the use of the M train.  The adventure continues...

Time carving...

Carving out time has been on my mind lately.  Not just the fact that I'd like to carve out time for this electronic music project of mine and for voice over work but carving out time in general.  How I've gone about it in the past and how I might do it now given that my schedule is so much fuller than it ever has been.   I work 50 hours a week on average, I write music for film and I do voice overs, I have a yoga habit and occasionally, I like to go out to shows and meet people or go on dates. 

I could systematically look at my days and nights and subtract all the time when I'm not at a day job or somewhere that I need to be and then systematically rank things I do in order of importance but then something always gets left out and I start having to assure myself that I'll get around to it eventually and resign myself to the reality that some things may have to get put on the back burner for a while.   I don't really like operating this way to be honest but that's what it comes down to. 

The good thing is that I'm now at a point where my work schedule is steady enough that I could feasibly rethink all the other stuff I do and set days to do that (voice over and music on Wednesday and Friday mornings, and at some time during the day Saturday and Sunday, for example).  And I actually try to do that, yet somehow my schedule remains fluid and ever changing.  I'm always trying to squeeze in yoga here and there, and then I forget I have to find time for laundry or groceries or cooking so I don't have to eat out all the damn time.   

I've also always believed in the importance of scheduling free time into your schedule.  Without it I'd soon go insane.  Plus, having free time gives me that all important wiggle room when planning things.  Too often what can happen is that I schedule my days down to the minute and then if something comes up that I want to do or that I need to do but just forgot about, I have to give up something.  Too often it's yoga, other times it's cooking and then, in that case, I end up having to eat out. 

It's never simple either because if I want to cook to save money and also go to yoga, then I have to (like I'm doing tomorrow), go to work first with all the food I've cooked, drop if off in the fridge, then go to yoga.  And tomorrow I can't go straight home after yoga because I have a dentist appointment to get a cavity filled at 1pm and then by the time that's over I don't think I'll have time to go home so I may as well go straight to work.  But then the problem is I'd like to have my laptop with me so I can work if I need to but then I have to carry it around along with my yoga mat. 

Then, if I've done all that, I have no time to put in voice over auditions.  I may be staying fit and saving money by not eating out (also avoiding gluten) but I'm not advancing the voice over career at the pace I'd like to.  I just wish that I didn't have to sacrifice those two things that I love, yoga and digestive harmony (haha!), in order to advance my career. 

But I'm resourceful and I'll find a way.  I always do.  I was trying for a while to record voice over auditions on my laptop during my break from work but it's not always feasible.  It's only an hour after all, and any audition that I throw together in that amount of time is probably not going to be my best work. Plus, in order for it to be worthwhile for me to do auditions, I want them to be good quality, something that's unpredictable when I'm doing them away from the home studio.  Also, I often want to do multiple auditions in order to increase the odds that they will be heard and that I might get called back, but I can't really do a good job on more than two auditions in the space of an hour.

So that's out.  But I've found that, if it's a direct invite, then it most definitely is worthwhile to squeeze an audition out in such a small amount of time.  After all, my first job came from an audition I pulled together at work.  And I nailed it. But it wasn't ideal. 

Now, I've certainly cleared my schedule when I've had a music job before that needed to get completed so it's not unreasonable to think that I could do the same with voice over.   So that's the next thing.  I'm getting close to starting to score the pilot episode of "The Life" and am just about to master the recording of the song Amanda and I wrote for the show.  With the lull between those two, maybe I'll treat my voice over stuff like I do the music.  I really just want to sit down and start contacting people I've worked with again and possibly find some new clients. 

But then, I started off this blog talking about the electronic music project which I still haven't figured out how to devote time to.  The last time I devoted any time to it was when I knew I was going to be performing.  So I'm a little more concerned about that not getting its fair share of attention than I am the voice over work.  I've managed to find time for that in all this craziness and even pulled off squeezing in a few gigs in between CNN and NY1 when I was working 60 hours a week back in the summer time. 

The electronic music project is a colossal undertaking though.  One in which I will I have to devote loads of time not just writing the music but also working out the logistics of performing them with a drummer, getting time and space to rehearse with said drummer.  I guess I'm in no rush to make it happen which is part of the problem.  I can spread out my progress on it, no problem.  But it is something that I've been talking about for far too long.  It is nice that I can look at it and at least acknowledge that I've advanced to some degree. 

With that said, though, it's hard when you've basically already planned out most of the month ahead to fathom squeezing in that one added project.  That's about all I have time to think about tonight because there's that one thing in my schedule that I can't shove aside to make room for other things...and that is sleep.  Good night.

Oh yeah, I'm a composer...

It feels good to be composing again.  Seemingly, under a month ago I was complaining about doing all this freelance TV work and not having much time to write.  Now, here it is mere weeks later and I've got several music projects lined up, only one of which I knew about in advance.  In fact, the one I did know about developed into several projects in one.

The trailer for "The Life" is being produced right now as we speak and on top of that I'm going to be working on a song for the end credits of the series with singer/songwriter Amanda Brecker.  Extremely excited about that collaboration which came out of the blue earlier this week.

I'm also currently composing a piano theme for a film I'll be scoring, prior to shooting, for a director I worked with last year.  So far the director and I have zeroed in on an overall mood and tonality and a basic melody which I will be fleshing out later this week.  They begin shooting on the 19th of August.

Add to that, a friend connected me with a .org that she works for that is looking for a 7 second bumper for their online learning channel (kinda like the opening to TED Talks).  The News Literacy Project is an educational program that promotes media literacy among high school kids.  So, that project is happening concurrently with the above and I'll likely be working directly with the motion graphics editor this week to find something that will highlight her animation.

All of the above events have me in this strange euphoric state right now.  I can't believe I got so much work all at once.  I'm still working every day of the week, sometimes at both jobs (TruTV and NY1) so finding the time for all these projects is going to be a bit of a challenge.  But that's never stopped me before.  I'm hoping to meet with Amanda this Friday to talk about our collaboration; it sounds like I'll be seeing the first drafts of the animation for the .org by Friday or Monday; and I'm hoping that tonight I can start drafting some musical ideas for "The Life" trailer.

Recording in my living room in the last few hours before my cousin returns from vacation seems like a good idea...even if it will be after midnight.  My downstairs neighbors have never complained even when I would play the piano, which, I'm sure, they would have to be able to hear.  A little acoustic guitar, post midnight, never hurt anyone.

As for the theme for Ben's film, I've got a leg up on it and I just need to start dragging my laptop around with me so I can work on the structure of the piece.  I think I'll actually score this one out using Sibelius, which I realize I haven't used in a good long while because I haven't really had a need to score anything since last summer.  So that should be fun.

Another thing I may need to try and accomplish tonight though is to submit an audition for a voice over job I was invited to audition for at Edge Studio. The deadline is 3pm tomorrow so hopefully I can hammer that out tonight.

And this leads me to my next exciting piece of news, and ya know what? Never mind. I don't want to jinx it. You'll know when I know. It's voice over related, I will say that.

On to a final piece of news: this past weekend my brother and his wife welcomed Donovan Eugene Stewart Daoust into the world. He was born at 8:06 pm Saturday night, just as I was going on stage with Lacy at Jamey's House of Music in Philly. I'm incredibly psyched to visit them in a few weeks and meet the little guy. He's adorable. :)

That'll be a nice little break as well, getting out of town for a slice and then a little nostalgia, likely visiting my old college town and some friends there. Updates to come on the projects as they advance!

Doldrums...

Yes, it's summer.  Yes, there's a heat wave.  Let's get that out of the way.  I've been so exhausted I barely have any energy left to rant about how it's just now occurring to me, after having a ceiling fan installed in my living room, that the A/C unit we have is just not powerful enough to cool this apartment.  It reads what I think, or must assume is, ambient temperature and currently it says 89 degrees.  It feels slightly cooler than outside in here so I don't understand where it's reading that temperature.  I round up and that says 90 to me.  At this point, I really can't even have a sheet on me in my bed because it's so so hot in my room.  The situation is that the A/C can only be plugged into one outlet due to the old wiring in the apartment.  One breaker is wired just for the room where the A/C unit is and the other breaker is for everything else.  We found this out over a year ago the first time we tried to toast and microwave at the same time and I had to tumble down 4 flights of stairs to the basement to trip our breakers.

So, that's where I'm at as I come back from Manhattan at 2 in the morning and start thinking about trying to sleep in this.  I know it happens every year but it just sucks.  And I know I'll feel different when we hit that week where the temperature drops to the teens in January but we've got autumn between that and this so I'm not thinking about that right now.  I am thinking about another A/C unit with a higher BTU than our current.  And the great music I just saw tonight at Rockwood.  Mieka Pauley again.  I think I'm in love...or something like it. 

But, that's not what I want to talk about tonight.  I'm finally writing again.  For a film that the director I worked with last year just sprung on me.  At the moment all I'm doing is developing a theme for the main character in a quirky dark comedy with nothing to go on but the script and a few youtube links with music he'd like it to sound like.  I'm struggling with something though. Often, as a film composer, or a composer in general, I get asked to compose something that sounds like [insert style, genre, specific song here].  My question is always "how do I do that and still be original?"  Don't get me wrong.  I can emulate with the best of them.  Comes from having experience singing, piano-ing and guitar-ing in a very wide range of styles and having a freaking masters degree in music composition.  But some days I just want to write what I want to write and have the director say "yes, that!  Keep that shit coming! More of that Tim Daoust signature shit!" Instead of having them say, "can you make it sound like [insert style, genre, specific song here]?"  

It makes we wanna shake them and say, "let me do my freaking job for Chrissake!"  But I know that would be unprofessional and that I should really center myself and ask, the question I just posited in the last paragraph: "how do I do that and still be original?"  I know I can do it.  I did it here with the help of the inimitable Crystal Bright on the accordion.  A director wanted accordion music à la the Amélie Soundtrack for his production reel so I picked this song to sort of model it after.  And I think I did pretty well plus I put my own rock edge into it (listen around 1:28).  So, now I need to figure out how to do something along these lines for the current project.  And it hit me the other day, that yeah, I can do this so stop being such a sour puss about it.  It's a challenge in its own rite and if I put myself in the right mindset, it could certainly be a worthy one.  I don't always have to be working on a project where I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. After all, this is all work for hire stuff.  Of course, to some extent, I'm going to have to bow to the desires of whomever I'm working for.  And it may be years before I meet a director who likes my stuff and seeks me out for it instead of just liking working with me and knowing I can emulate what they want.

It does sort of bring me down sometimes though.  I get to thinking, "am I ever going to get to where I'm writing film music that's highly personal and unique to me if I keep writing for people who just want it to sound like their favorite music?"  I'm sure every film composer in the history of film composers have asked this question, on down to John Williams himself (sorry, I just went with one of the most recognizable film composers there).  I'm sure he had to compose a bunch of stuff that wasn't unique to him first before composing the stuff he's known for and, in fact, probably sought out for.  Or did he?  I'll have to ask him sometime.

Anyway, it's late and I'm rambling and I wish I lived alone so I could sit down at the piano right now.  As it stands, it'll be a few days before I can do so again.  So much work, plus Lacy and I are gearing up for the great city of Philadelphia next week.  More on that later.  Good night kids!

Work-a-holic...

I never thought I'd let almost a month go by without blogging but I'm starting to realize this week that it's not simply because I'm busy.  This was a blog I started about being a composer in the city and lately it's just been about being in the city.  I've had a lot of opportunities and a lot of interesting things happening lately but at the moment almost none of those things have anything to do with composing.

Don't get me wrong.  This stint at CNN and the subsequent one at TruTV and even my ongoing voice over career which finally seems to be ramping up a bit, are a huge boon to me.  But it brings to the forefront that ever present struggle to balance time and money.  I need money to survive here but I lose time to create when I work 64 hours a week.

I've been fascinated by and immensely appreciative of this turn of events since April, the serendipity of it all.  And I have been loving having the cash buffer and the peace of mind that I'm paying things off left and right.  But I certainly have missed working on music and creating.  The last time I had a creative project of my own, it wasn't even technically my own. I was remixing someone else's work for a contest...one in which I was up against some seasoned professionals and had no real chance of winning.  And before that I was remixing my old stuff.  Hence not really writing anything new.  Heck, I don't even have time these days to sit down with my guitar software and tweak my sound for Lacy's shows.  I will say that over the last few months I have randomly come up with guitar looping ideas but none of those has crystallized past the precursory jam sessions I have with myself.  In other words, I haven't recorded any of them.

But, there is a change coming.  The work at CNN will dry up in a few weeks, at which point I will be able to pick up almost immediately working at TruTV.  They have an ongoing project that they've trained me for that I'll be coming in to push forward on.  I've decided that when I do start scheduling my hours with them, I won't fill my schedule to the brim like I did with CNN.  This way, I can allot more time to creative endeavors and things like laundry and cooking.  I also just renewed my subscription to Voice123.com and will be needing time to audition.  Maybe I'll start dating again.

On top of all of this, though I complain I haven't had any musical projects to excite and inspire me lately, I do have at least one project on the horizon.  "The Life."  They're done shooting and about to start editing the pilot any day now. I'll being seeing one of the producers in about a half hour here at NY1 when he gets in and we'll have a half hour or so to chat.  Things are looking good there.

And I know I said "at least one" but, I'm not going to say much more about any other ones right now.  Too soon.  Too soon.  With that, I think I'm going to end this brief entry.   And I'll keep updating as I transition here in a few weeks and as I start to have more time for music.

New music uploads...

I finally decided tonight to go ahead and upload the tracks I recently finished mastering to my sound cloud page.  Wanted to give you all a chance to listen to what I've been working so hard on.  This is, of course, only the beginning.  I've composed about 12 new tunes since August as well, all of them in various stages of completeness, and all of them which will eventually go to the licensing agency as well.  

The tracks.  

Black and Blue are songs that I wrote for Steve Pitre for the Insiders1 Promo that he produced last year.    I liked the idea of making them sister songs and the color blue came to mind almost immediately when I thought about what to name Blue.  Black followed rather obviously.  The versions I just posted contain some new material not on the versions on the promo.  Black got more keyboard parts that I almost cut completely from the track originally (just developed them a little more).  Blue got some guitar parts with a wash of delay effects that had not previously existed.  

A Million Shades of Blue I wrote back in 2010 but knew I wanted to send to the licensing agency as soon as I started thinking about which pre-existing tracks I could repurpose.  I wrote the song one day starting from a riff that I came up with while playing around with new sounds in my Native Instruments synths (FM8, Absynth and Massive) and, as often happens, I didn't come up with a name for it until a few days later.  I was walking home from a friend's party at around 5am with the song running through my head and my eyes wandered up to the sky.  It being a little under an hour until sunrise, the sky was displaying this amazing indigo color that faded to black the farther from the eastern sky you looked.  The phrase "A Million Shades of Blue" passed through my head and I knew immediately that that's what the song was supposed to be called.  I can't remember if I wrote the keyboard part for this one before or after the name arrived.  It used to be played with just the Absynth patch, that screaming sound you hear underneath the keyboard.  I added the keyboard on this remix to give the melody more definition there and dropped the Absynth down in the mix to get rid of the muddiness I was hearing.  

Song for the Awakened was written all the way back in 2004.  I've always enjoyed the groove of this song and was particularly proud of some experimentation I did with truncating the groove before it could finish the measure and restarting it but not doing it the same in all parts.  I found that the phrases in each instrument could fit together in all kinds of different ways if I just let go of all conventional time signatures.  The mix on the old version troubled me greatly and I had to get ruthless with it.  This was one of the milestones during this project that I blogged about a few weeks back.  Getting a handle on the mix and actually liking the song again was a great boost to my confidence.  All it took was realizing that I had three instruments playing what one could handle and that there were large chunks of the song that didn't need both the keyboard and the guitar part to be fighting for attention.   Can't remember where the name for this song came from.  Think I was re reading passages in Radiant Mind at the time and the thought of being "Awakened" resonated with me a lot.  

Daresay was a favorite from the 2004 batch and I think it actually got released with Windy April and Pastel on iTunes a while back but I didn't really promote that incarnation of the Automatic Head/Disrupt moniker.   Daresay was a tune that I wrote in Fruity Loops entirely but this version used some sampled harp from Kontakt and my own guitar playing to spice it up.  Plus I used Kontakt to splice my own drum line up and create a breakdown drum part that I actually liked this time (vs. the old version that I felt I could never get right).  I wrote a blog a while back on my main page about how to do this with Kontakt and have used the technique a few times now.  Currently using it with the remix contest I'm working on, in fact. 

The last one I want to talk about was another new one from 2010 called Sleepwalking With You, a track written with Fruity Loops and transferred to Logic.  Another of the batch of tracks for the licensing agency that I had trouble with and then got ruthless with.  This one, not so much with the mix but with the decision to add other instruments.  I had written piano parts and several guitar parts that all got chucked one day when I just started using distorted guitar and the trademark backwards effect that I got from the Grain Delay box in Guitar Rig 5 and used on the score for "The Life."  That eureka moment sent the song into overdrive and made it among the first that I finished.  I can't remember why I chose the title Sleepwalking With You...maybe just that it sounds dreamy, like you're half awake, and the phrase sounded funny to me when it passed through my brain.  Now that I listen back with the distorted guitar it sounds like it might be, not sleepwalking, but a night terror.  But it does sound sort of mournful and wistful like you're dreaming about someone you've lost or that is not in your life anymore.  

That's about as deep as I'm going to get about it.  For now, I hope you enjoy listening to the tracks and that you've enjoyed this little insight into my compositional process.  Take care!