Tag Archives: composing

Autumn Tidings

Posted by Piscis on

Fish Notes

 

As it turns out, I do still exist, and ’tis the season to be spooky (or at least somber and moody), so in the spirit of Halloween, let’s play a bit of catch-up with a few of my semi-regular October pieces over the intervening years since my last update.

 

 

2024 – Crimson Spiral

The most recent of the bunch.  A tense little harpsichord sonata that I’d roughed out a few bars for last year, and ended up returning to over the past couple weeks and finishing with atypically little turmoil.

 
 

2023 – A Path Through the Bramble

Another harpsichord piece (there’s just something classy and autumn-y about the harpsichord, you know?).  This one gave me a lot more trouble, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to properly finish it, as it wasn’t quite clicking until I changed a single note by a single semitone in one chord, and then suddenly everything fell into place, and I ultimately ended up reasonably happy with it.

 
 

2022 – Susurrus

Just a solo piano piece this time.  I like the sound of this felt piano in theory, but it always feels terribly difficult to equalize, and mastering has never been a strong suit of mine.  I suppose I’m generally O.K. with how it turned out, though, provided it’s not played back on speakers that exacerbate the messier frequency interactions.

 
 

2020 – Tell Us How You Really Feel

I think it’s fair to say that 2020 was a pretty awful year for the world at large, so this was something of an anti-tribute to it.  This piece is more of an experimental, grungy, angry, corrupted semi-mechanical cacophony of bad times (but still generally melodic, as I have a hard time committing to straight-up ambient compositions).

 

 

Bene scribete.

Short Film Score Demo

Posted by Piscis on

I haven’t posted anything music-related in a little while, so I figured I’d share a little something I’ve been working on.

I was asked to do the music for a short film of my brother’s, and this was the demo chosen out of the handful I put together for it.  I was going for kind of an ’80s noir vibe with it.

Hope you enjoy!

 

 

Bene scribete.

SoundCloud

Posted by Piscis on
SoundCloud Logo

Hear the…cloud.

 

In contemplating a better way to show off music in the e-land, for some reason it only recently occurred to me to try out SoundCloud.  Turns out it’s a fairly nifty little service.

The premise is simple – users upload sound and music, and others can then stream it to their computers and devices, more or less like a sans-video YouTube (strange that these two things didn’t happen the other way around, but…whatever).  A free account will let you upload two hours’ worth of audio (assuming reasonable compression, that’s likely less than 200MB – small in comparison to most of today’s big free hosting services, but hey, free is still free, and there don’t appear to be any ads).  You’re also capped at 100 downloads per track, assuming you enable direct downloads (which it’s cool that you can).  There are also some arbitrary limitations, such as only being able to create three different sets/groups/organizational what-have-yous to put your tracks in, but overall, it’s plenty sufficient for sharing out a few dozen songs or so.

Perhaps handiest of all, you can neatly embed a player for a track or entire setlist just about anywhere, even here in WordPress!

 

 

These are some old synthesizer compositions I did ten or more years ago and figured I’d stick on there for fun. Now that I have much better equipment, I might see about redoing some of them…

So, am I late to the party?  Do any of you out there use SoundCloud?  Or have you found any other good audio sharing services?

 

Also, I just noticed that Dictionary.com‘s word of the day is empurple – to make or become purple.  I…kind of find it fantastic that that’s a thing.

 

Bene scribete.

Musical Fish

Posted by Piscis on

So it turns out that I’m a composer, sometimes.

 

Fish Notes

 

I may occasionally post my compositions here, under the questionable technicality that I’m ‘writing’ music.  Music is usually a good companion to any story, though, and I find that one often inspires me toward the other.  It’s a cycle of influence that feeds creativity on both fronts.

To start off with, I’ll share a piece I wrote earlier this year.  WordPress isn’t super-friendly toward audio without spendy upgrades, so if you’re interested, click on the picture or here to listen.  I was going for something cold and curious, somewhat understated.

 

Bene scribete.