Akai EWI 5000 announced

UPDATE (25 Jan 2014): Video of the thing in action. Doesn’t reveal much, but I’ve added it anyway: Original Post: I plan on getting back to my promised post about Korean education, but this news deserves a little post, so: Although I have a Yamaha WX5 waiting for me in Seoul, my newest piece of musical kit is an Akai MPKmini, which I picked up to help me get some soundtrack work done for Mrs. Jiwaku’s latest ongoing film project. It’s an SF film, so a spacey, electronics-heavy soundtrack is needed, and the MPKmini is cheap, portable, and versatile enough …

Continue Reading

“The Logical Question and the Decaying Answer”

Whew! I’m feeling a sense of immense achievement, probably a little out of proportion to what I’ve actually done. Then again, this is a blog, so… I haven’t composed any new music (in terms of writing it down, I mean) in a couple of decades, but I have finally finished inputting the first of the pieces I’m notating with Musescore. Here’s the first page: I’m pleased because Musescore also lets me export audio for the pieces. The renderings are not perfect–honestly, they show the flaws of the piece, in that a human touch is really necessary for the piece to …

Continue Reading

Altissimo and Productivity

In middle school, and early on in high school, I remember loving Saturday Night Live… which, for me, means “classic” SNL which, because I was born in 1974, means John Lovitz, Phil Hartman, Dennis Miller, Victoria Jackson (sigh) Jan Hooks, and Dana Carvey, mainly. But a highlight of the show–and what I always wished they’d include more of–was seeing (or at least hearing) Lenny Pickett wail on the tenor saxophone, as he did on the closing tune, week after week: http://youtu.be/lPAeCZZstK4 I’d wait through the R.E.M. and Randy Travis and Linda Ronstadt for those little clips of the house band… they were …

Continue Reading

Eine Kleine Zombiemusik

I’ve just put the finishing touches on the music for Mrs. Jiwaku’s third short film, a zombie movie. Over the course of the project (developing the music, I mean) I’ve posted in-progress clips to Soundcloud, but now I’ve got the final, tidied-up and cleaner tracks up. They are, for the moment, downloadable–in part because Mrs. Jiwaku will need to download them. They are quite loud, by the way: I de-normalized the output because it seems to fit the aggressive sound we need, especially in the non-autonormalized version of Track #3. Just a warning, for those listening on headphones or about …

Continue Reading