JaapVisser

Yeah ink and paper is still the best. I still have a big writing table here in my studio and I still write most of the stuff first on paper :D

Thanks Nigel (nice to see you here btw :D) and Michael! Yeah it is amazing what is possible nowadays with synths. I have been a pen and paper composer till a year ago and I made a switch to film and game music and started to learn everything about sampling etc and a new world opened :D I still like live music, but the music I compose now with samples is different then my live music. I try to let go the idea that everything has to be hyper-realistic and instead I am focussing now on making "a good sound".

Hi people, I recently joined the forum and I thought lets share some music. It is a piece called Keep Moving and it is an action track written as pitch for Sony. The definate use of the piece will be defined later for a later to be announced project (and additional music will be written by then), but for now it is standalone piece which gives a good idea on what kind of music I am writing for games and films. Keep Moving Libraries used: EWQL Gold XP EWQL RA EWQL Stormdrum Sean Beeson's Tsaiko Drums Spectrasonics Atmosphere Private guitar library Private sound effects library Enjoy :)

I am not the worlds most advanced piano player, but my sight reading is very good. A few tips on how I improved my sight reading: 1: funny enough this is not music related, but I started to learn to read blocks of texts. Take a big book, focus on one point and see how quickly and how much text you can read without moving your eyes. Do this every day half an hour and you will notify improvement also on sight reading music. 2: quickly browse through a music piece and highlight a few spots that seems very important for you with a colourmarker. It is easier to read from marked to marked piece and you have some guidance already. 3: hand/eye reaction is more important then you think. Do all kind of excercises to improve your hand/eye coordination. The better that is, the quicker you communicate between the different brainparts that are needed to do good sight reading.

One of my favorite pieces. Highly recommended.

My favorite ensemble is: Clarinet, harp, piano, 2 accordions and an electric bass guitar. I have written a variety of pieces for this ensemble and I love the restrictions of the ensemble, but as well as the options to make very colourfull music.

I am using symphonic choirs mainly with Nuendo 4 now, but I will make a demo with how it works and sounds in Finale. I have experimented with it how it would work with Finale since I still make my orchestral scores in there, but I am using symphonic choirs mainly for my film and game music and it just saves time to do it directly in Nuendo. I have not found a really good solution yet to make it sound good as well for just basic choir music like a cantate or whatever, I mainly use it for indeed the "cheesy" choir sounds for films and games, but I know it is possible. There are some composers who are really good in programming symponic choirs into an almost good and realistic sounding choir. The text is read from Worldbuilder and the text you implemend in Finale is not read by worldbuilder so you have to insert the text twice so to say.

I don't know if you got it working already, but here is an instruction from the EWQL site: EastWest Soundsonline FAQ - How do I use Choirs and WordBuilder with Finale 2006 on a PC? It mentions Finale 2006, but the instruction will work in the later versions as well. I have got it working in 2007 and I assume 2008a will not be a different story.

First of all it depends of course who rejects the piece. If it is your teacher or somebody you are working for then it is quite hard. On the other hand you are dealing then probably with somebody who has the knowlegde to judge the piece and reject it with a reason. The best you can do then is to take as much distance as possible from the piece and try to observe it in an objective matter and look why it is rejected. Probably after some time you can find some good reasons and or feedback that can actually improve your piece. If the piece is rejected by the public then you have to start wondering about a few things: 1: what is the public, are they ready for your music 2: how was the performance and could it be of influence of the rejection 3: what went wrong in convincing the public what your piece was about and what your intensions are with the composition and would it be better if they would have listen to it again (always ask the people if they are willing to listen to it again to see if they still have the same judgement). Rejection is never nice, but mostly it contains valuable assets to improve your work or maybe even more important on how to show and perform your music. When I was working as contemporary music composer I had a lot of music rejected by the public in the beginning, but I figured out after some time that I did not took the public that serious and automaticly put them in a corner and judged them that they had no clue about what was going on. Even if they don't have a clue what is going on, it is our job to make sure that they know and try to get them involved.