A lot has happened in the past month, and I’ve just been too busy to post anything. I’ve procrastinated writing this blog entry because I wanted to post my new piece at the same time, but now that’s it been almost two weeks of tweaking, I figure I better just send it into the Internet void.
So what’s been happening recently?
I was asked a couple of weeks ago to play a musical number for a fireside. This gave me the opportunity to flesh out Did You Think To Pray as a piano arrangement. Unfortunately, on the day of the fireside I found out that the number was canceled because of lack of time. Bummer. This ended up being a blessing in disguise, as I was asked by my former branch president to collaborate with a vocalist and do a musical number for his son’s missionary farewell. I met with Kevin O. this week and we ended up deciding on using DYTTP. Kevin’s an extremely talented singer/performer, having performed on Broadway and conducted various related workshops.
The final touches of the arrangement came as we worked to layer the vocals on top of the original chordal harmonies. Kevin has a great tenor voice, so we quickly transposed it into the key of G, which made it more singable than the Eb key signature of the original hymn. He also gave some great ideas in how we could build emotion into the the third verse and meld the intro and outros motifs with the rest of the music. We did a quick rehearsal before the meeting, and everything came together this morning during the service. The third verse was just powerful. I think we really captured the essence of the hymn by the way the music and vocals developed through out the arrangement. I’m going have to spend some time in Sibelius putting the thing down to music notation, but look for the sheet music sometime in the future. I also need to do a piano/vocal audio recording.
Oh, remember the arrangement of the Final Fantasy piece I posted a while back in this blog post? OCRemix finally posted a decision on their website. It ended up getting accepted by which was a nice little pick-me up. I didn’t realize how high the bar was until after I submitted the entry. Since I was submitting a piano solo, I debated whether the judges would understand the method of interpretation, that the arrangment was trying to evoke the nostalgia of wandering a town that’s just a shade of its former glory. Well, the judges got it. You can find the piece on the OCRemix Site here, under my artist profile Jennerstein. Comments have been favorable enough that I feel I’ve caught the remixing bug. If anything, it’s a fun exercise down memory lane for me. There’s something challenging about trying to capture both the experience of the game and the experience of playing the game. I’m thinking my next project will be a new ageish/dance remix of Bubble Bobble.
Although I’ve had experience writing New Age piano pieces, I haven’t really tried mixing New Age and trance together. So, this past month I’ve been experimenting in writing/producing within this new style. There’s shades of piano rock, trance, and ambient, with New Age serving as inspiration. I guess you could even say there’s a little bit of Robert Miles too. Anyway, I played it in the car for my friend, Tony, and he immediately had visions of Neverending Story. Which I guess isn’t a bad thing. You can find the piece below:
As this is all experimental stuff (at least for me anyway), comments are more than welcome.