Well I’ve been updating you every so often on the progress of Infinity… Plus One and now I have a release date for it. It will be released on Wednesday, 29th February 2012, a great date. Oh, and it’s lost it’s dots! The title has changed slightly to be Infinity Plus One with no ellipsis after ‘Infinity’. Not a major change, obviously!
The artwork has been finalised, it is similar to on my previous post but Sara, the photographer (and my lovely wife) decided she wanted to try again, and her second attempt was more fitting.
I’ve put another track from the album up on Soundcloud as well – it’s called Frictionless Echoes and you can either listen to it in the player below, or click this link.
Well, I think the mastering is now completed for Infinity… Plus One. It will all need a good listen again to make sure that it’s definitely done but I think it’s time now to let a select few hear it and get some feedback from outside my immediate family.
Assuming it’ll take about 4 weeks to get it to people and to receive feedback, I think a target release of the end of February seems like a good target (maybe even February 29th? It’s not often there’s a chance to release an album on that date!).
A provisional cover image has been put together too. I usually scour royalty-free image sites to find something suiting the image I have in my head, but this time I had no need. My wonderful wife, Sara, is an amateur photographer and so she took a photograph that matched what I wanted!
So, all in all this was a great weekend (and I even got to watch The Return Of The Jedi on BluRay, but that’s a story for a different blog)!.
Btw, I still haven’t decided what to do regarding the long track I mentioned in my last blog post… all thoughts welcome!
First of all… HAPPY NEW YEAR to one and all. I hope that 2012 is a great year and brings you all closer to your hopes and dreams.
I just thought I’d start the year off as I mean to continue by updating the Purple Rhapsody blog, let’s hope I can carry on updating it as things happen!
The big news today is that the music for the next album, Infinity… Plus One, is all recorded! There are 5 tracks in all: one 32 minutes long and four shorter ones. The album has an overall concept of Infinity and most of the tracks are recorded with synthesisers, guitars, drums, and piano.
The next stage is for me to listen to it until I can bear no more – so that I can find all the little niggles and fix them prior to mastering the album.
I have quite a large decision to make regarding the long track… it has 9 distinct sections and could be split into 9 tracks on the album, but that would mean that the album would be more expensive (iTunes and Amazon base the price on the number of tracks). However, if it is just released as one 32 minute track it will not be downloadable from iTunes or Amazon except as part of the whole album (they put a limit on a track length of 10 minutes).
Any thoughts on this dilemma are welcomed – please comment below if you’ve got any thoughts!
I’ll keep you updated as things progress!
Meanwhile, there are a few early versions of 3 or 4 tracks from the album on my Soundcloud page.
Every Friday from 18th November through to the 16th December you’ll have the chance to win a copy of A Purple Christmas on Twitter and Facebook.
Each week I’ll tweet and post a message on the Friday and you’ll get one entry into the draw if you ‘Like’ my Facebook page and share the message, and you’ll also get one entry into the draw if you Follow @PurpleNews on Twitter and retweet the competition tweet. So you could end up with twice the chance to win!
Anyways, I’m away to get up to more music making shenanigans !
Well, after weeks and weeks of hard work and commitment, neglecting my family, and generally being a bit geeky a new website design has been launched!
It’s not too fancy behind the scenes but I think it’s a lot prettier than the old one – visit http://purplerhapsody.co.uk to see it in all it’s fanciness.
Well, once again it’s been too long since my last blog post… but I’ve been a very, very, busy bee!
Since my last blog entry I’ve prevaricated and delayed, I’ve hummed and I’ve hawed… and in the end I decided to release a Purple Rhapsody Christmas single… but then my wife persuaded me to make it a Christmas EP – which seems like a mammoth task when it needs to be completed by the end of October to stand a chance of being released for Christmas…!
But guess what? Yup, that’s right… I’ve only just gone and done it, ain’t I?
If all goes according to plan, A Purple Christmas will be available to buy from the 11th of November… yup, that’s 11/11/11!
The cover is clean and simple – based on an image from user ‘magicmarie’ on SXC (I used another one of her images as the background for the Endless Lives album cover).
As I type, CDBaby is processing the digital download and the physical copies are being readied for selling from the Purple Rhapsody site.
There are 4 tracks on the EP, all nice Christmas Carols… except when a Purple Rhapsody arrangement comes to the fore, who knows what its going to end up sounding like…?
Well… actually, you can know. Check out the set on my Soundcloud page to get an early listen (unless of course the end of October is far too early to be listening to Christmas music)!
So, after 3 weeks of living and breathing Christmas music it’s time for a rest… perhaps I’ll get back to my next album, Infinity… Plus One, or maybe just chill – after all, it’s almost Christmas!!!!!
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on the soundtrack to a horror documentary called Screamer – The Art of Terror. It follows the trials and tribulations of a few ‘haunted house’ operators in America (i.e. houses that are built to scare people – not houses that have ghosts). The film will be finished in time to be submitted to Sundance at the end of the month – so keep your fingers crossed for rave reviews!
Anyway, I’ve written probably about 20 minutes of music overall and it’s been an overwhelmingly positive experience. Before this the only scoring I’d worked on was for a never-released DVD called Santeetlah for which I was just asked to provide gentle music to be used as background to the scenes (the music ended up being released on an album called Seven Worlds – you can listen to it on the albums page).
So this has been a learning experience. The hardest thing I found was making the music hit the visual cues; I’m so used to writing music that breathes in it’s own rhythm that taking my usual musical workflow and making it fit an external influence was awkward at best.
However, having finished the music now (subject to the director, William N McHugh saying he’s happy with it!) I’d recommend that any musician who gets the chance to score something should jump at the chance! Literally! Jump up and down and scream at the director “ME ME ME ME ME ME”!!!!
I’m not at liberty to share most of the music, however I’ve been given permission to share the music from the end credits… and so here it is (link below).
Let me know (by leaving a comment!) if you’d like to know more about how I put the track together… I won’t be doing another Life and Times of a Purple Rhapsody track series but will jot some things down from my notes if you’d like!
Tonight I’ve been working on the first track from my forthcoming album, Infinity… Plus One. It’s a long piece of continuous music and it’s approximately 33 minutes long!
I’m still quite a way from having the album completed but the length of this track got me thinking… should I split it into shorter tracks for iTunes, Amazon, etc. If I don’t then it’ll be one big track that will be marked as ‘Album Only’ meaning people will have to to download the whole album to be able to get it. If I do split it into a few tracks (and the natural breaks are making it look like 6 or 7 tracks) then it’ll cost about £5 to download each of the individual tracks…. but it is about half the length of the whole album so that sounds about right.
On a previous album, Fractal Landscapes, I had a 25 minute track that I left as one large track. This is also the release that has had more complete album downloads than any other… now is that because to get the long track people had to download the whole album? Or is it just because there are more ‘quality’ tracks on the whole album?
In short, I have no idea… do you? All comments and input appreciated!
Recently I’ve been going through a bit of a bad time with my confidence in my musical abilities. I tried to create an arrangement of a piece for my Infinity Plus One album and it sounded twee and, to be frank, like it had been done by someone with no musical talent whatsoever.
That was about 3 weeks ago and since then I’ve hardly touched my piano, not turned on my music PC, or really done anything musical. Until tonight…!
I thought I’d best do something about my problem and while sitting feeling a bit melancholy I had an idea for a slow piece of music, a piece of music so sad and depressing that it would make people drop dead from depression just by listening to it.
I sat down at the piano and realised that actually if I sped it up a bit and put it in 3/4 time it might just sound like something decent. So that’s what I did. About 95% of my music is in 4/4 time and the other 5% is in something a bit more weird like 5/4 (e.g. Arpeggiatore) or 14/16 (e.g. a segment of Fractal Landscapes). A tiny percentage ends up in 3 beats to the bar, usually because I think 3/4 just sounds to darn cheerful.
Anyway, here’s the result of me finally breaking down that wall – it isn’t the original ‘death by depression’ piece that came to me originally (I don’t think I ever dare record that one!).
This is the 3rd and final part of the series of blogs delving into my own way of creating a Purple Rhapsody track. You really should read Part 1 and Part 2 before reading this, but who’s going to stop you?
The first two parts started off with the piano idea that I originally had, and then turning it into a synth-heavy piece of music. I told you about the decisions I had to make and tried to explain my concept of a good melody.
Stage 6 – Finishing The Music
I have huge problems trying to decide how to finish a piece of music. I kind of hate fading a track out unless the track really sounds like it needs it, however the number of tracks that I’ve done it with can be counted on the fingers of one hand. At the same time not every track can end on a climax.
With Fast Piano we’re at the stage where the main melody and chord structure (let’s call it A) has been stated twice at the start (once without the melody immediately followed by it with the melody); a second melody and chord structure (called, imaginatively, B) has also made it’s appearance. Then there was a section where the first two chords of A was repeated (let’s call that A*) and then the whole of A was repeated. At that point I had stopped. The structure so far has been A-A-B-A*-A.
Hope I’ve not lost you!
The obvious thing to do is to bring back section B and then either repeat one of the sections while it fades out; bring it to a climax; or gently end it. I decided to go for the gentle ending!
Here’s how it sounds with B and then a softer piano ending.
But there’s a problem with this… section B is essentially the same chords repeated twice so to my ears it sounds like it gets a bit repetitive the second time it’s brought in. To combat this I added a second instrument to play in ‘counterpoint’ with the melody (I don’t know if counterpoint is the right musical term, please correct me if I’m wrong!).
So… now I’ve finished the music. Here’s the whole track from start to finish.
Before I get started on this section I should tell you that I only about mixing and mastering from a couple of magazine tutorials and reading some music oriented forums. So please don’t take what I say as being the proper way to do it- this is just what I do!
The first thing I do is to make sure that I’m happy with how the overall track is sounding. I go through each of my tracks in my DAW narrowing the effective EQ range for each one. When I record electric guitar or piano I make sure I use EQ to remove everything under 50Hz and sometimes up to a few hundred Hz if there aren’t any low notes being played. Similarly for bass sounds I’ll often lop off the top of the frequency range. Also, I’ll try to make sure that overall the track isn’t tending to pan left or right.
I then add a new bus to my DAW called PreMaster and direct all the tracks (and effects) to pass through it. I then adjust the level on the PreMaster track so that the maximum dB level is –3 at the loudest part of the track.
I then bounce the output of the PreMaster bus to a new track.
This new track is then soloed and I set about adjusting the EQ of the whole track, adding some compression to level the dynamics, and then adding a limiter to bring the whole track volume up.
Firstly, the EQ. By this stage there shouldn’t be any need for much adjustment. If I need to adjust any frequency band by more than 1dB then I need to go back to my individual tracks, adjust them, and then re-bounce to a new track. I sometimes find that I need to level off the bass, or add a bit more brightness with some higher boosts, but it’s never anything major.
Then I add a compressor – again this is a very light operation, and it varies track by track. For Fast Piano although I’d bounced down a track where the maximum level was –3dB the average was actually much quieter than that so I set the compressor threshold to about –6dB and then set the ration to 2:1. This gives quite a gently ‘knee shaped’ compression.
Then I add the limiter – this is more drastic because the bounce down was quiet and the compressor has reduced the volume even more. I find that I need to boost by at least the same dB that I’ve set the compressor threshold to and then take it a couple of dB further.
If the limiter is limiting all the time then the sound will be far too flat so it’s really just a matter of setting it, listening and watching how much it’s cutting off, then adjusting it, listening and watching again, setting it,…. ad nauseum!
So, I’ve ended up with a version which is very crudely mastered. There a couple of pops and clicks in the piano part that need to be resolved but essentially the track is now complete. I know that I will definitely revisit it before it goes on the album to ensure that the overall sound fits in with the rest of the tracks but that won’t happen until later in the year.
Feel free to download it, and please please please give me constructive criticism!
Here’s the final(ish) mastered version. Also, I’ve retitled the track to be called
Lemniscate – which is the name for the infinity symbol (and other similar algebraic symbols).
Thanks for reading my blog! All comments always welcome (positive AND negative) and if you really liked the way I did it then let me know. If I get enough positive responses I might do another series on recording a track which is more ‘real instrument’ based.
