One Forward, Four Returns on Solo Cocktail Jazz Piano Listing

[RPaul]

All five songs are on my TAXI profile. The one that got forwarded is "Intimate Conversation". The ones that didn't were "After a Hard Day", "Laid Back Evening", "Mellowing Out", and "Winding Down", with the main comment being they weren't jazzy enough for the style needed. The last one also got a "could have a better developmental arc" comment and a note on the ending's being able to use "a little more resolve".

Here is the listing text:

SOLO PIANO COCKTAIL JAZZ INSTRUMENTALS are needed by an extremely active Music Licensing Company with a really, really long track record of placements in Film, TV, and Commercials.

This Company is looking for Down-to-Mid-Tempo Instrumentals in the general stylistic range of the following references:

"That Secret Place" by Barry Harris
"Everything Happens to Me" by Bill Evans
"Naomi's Love Song" by John Hicks

Please send polished, recently recorded Cocktail Jazz Instrumentals that feature Piano as their ONLY instrument. Captivating melodies, solid arrangements, and impeccable Jazz musicianship and technique are required for this pitch. Your production and any virtual Piano samples you use should be clean, clear, and high-quality. Imagine the type of music you might hear in the background of a scene set in a cocktail lounge – that's what they need!

NOTE: A well-recorded Piano is important for this request. Whether you use a real or virtual instrument, it needs to sound like the real thing, and well-recorded!
All submissions should be at least 2 minutes long and no longer than 5 minutes, give or take. Non-faded, buttoned endings will work best for this request. Please do NOT copy the referenced artists or songs in any way, shape, or form. Use them as a general guide for tempo, tone, and overall vibe. Broadcast Quality is needed.

This company offers an EXCLUSIVE, 50/50 deal. This Music Library splits ALL sync fees 50/50 with you. They’ll get 100% of the Publisher’s share, and you’ll keep 100% of the Writer’s share. You must own or control your Master and Copyright. Please do not send material for this pitch that has already been signed to other libraries or catalogs. Please submit as many Instrumentals as you’d like, online or per CD. All submissions will be screened and critiqued by TAXI. Submissions must be received no later than 11:59 PM (PST) on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021.  TAXI # S210302PJ

Rick

[Ted]

Congrats on the forward, Rick. Nice cues all--very relaxing and beautiful sounding.

[MikeNelson]

Beautiful, congrats!

[RPaul]

Thanks, guys.

This was a major experiment for me. I've never done cocktail piano before, no less cocktail jazz (decidedly not a jazz guy), but I have frequently enough just sat down at a piano or keyboard of some other sort and just ad-libbed. That is basically what I did here, except that I also recorded the MIDI data (9 pieces tracked without a click in the space of maybe 2-3 hours). I later separated them out into separate projects, created tempo maps for them, and cleaned them up a bit from there, mostly fixing really bad notes and occasionally smoothing out the tempo maps a bit. The ones I submitted were basically the ones I finished tweaking in time for the deadline. It was definitely a bit of a shotgun (I didn't have time to post anything for feedback). Interestingly, the one that got forwarded was the last one I tracked. I don't even remember why I worked on cleaning that one up early -- I just did the others in the order they were tracked.

Independent of whether anything comes of the one forward, or the rest of the pieces in some other context, learning how to do the process I used here in Cubase ended up being helpful for getting off to quick starts on recordings. In particular, my most natural way of playing is just to sit down at a keyboard and play and sing a song, but, when I'd go to record a song, I would either be tracking something to a click or a drum loop, at a tempo I've made my best intelligent guess to figure out. Not only does that not capture natural speedups and slowdowns in how I'd interpret the song, but it also ends up feeling a bit forced as a project starter and makes it hard to deal with things like time signature changes.

With the approach I used here, I can just track something as I feel it, then figure out the tempo and time signatures later, including smoothing things out to get a more steady tempo. I may well rerecord the piano part later, once I have a better view of where the overall arrangement is going to go, but that initial piano track, which was played while singing in the case of a song (albeit not tracking the vocal), captures the basic emotion of how I'd do the song live, and makes for a much more natural starting point. If I'm working with songs that area already written, it also makes it super quick to create recording starts. For example, my project after this one was the Beatles cover listing, and I tracked piano parts for 12 songs with this method in about 3 hours, taking a break between each one to pick the next songs (I was just trying songs from a Lennon & McCartney song book) and see how I might interpret it. I only had time to make a full recording of one of those starts by the deadline, but that one came together much quicker than it would have had I used my more usual approach to starting projects, and I'm reasonably certain the results were better than they would have been otherwise. (I did use the original piano track on that one, albeit smoothing the tempo out considerably and tweaking notes and rhythms where needed.)

Rick

[Ted]

Rick, that's interesting how you went about it. I'm not a great pianist at some genres, but I think eventually I'd like to try this genre-- but I was kinda stumped over the question of "click track or not?" and how to plan a workflow. That's the nice thing about MIDI is you can fix/change as many notes as you want.

I've played around with recording parts to a click track and then using a tempo map to make dynamic changes to the song as a whole so the parts speed up and slow down but stay in time with each other, but I haven't had much luck doing it the other way, but I haven't spent enough time working through it maybe.

[RPaul]

Rick, that's interesting how you went about it. I'm not a great pianist at some genres, but I think eventually I'd like to try this genre-- but I was kinda stumped over the question of "click track or not?" and how to plan a workflow. That's the nice thing about MIDI is you can fix/change as many notes as you want.

I've played around with recording parts to a click track and then using a tempo map to make dynamic changes to the song as a whole so the parts speed up and slow down but stay in time with each other, but I haven't had much luck doing it the other way, but I haven't spent enough time working through it maybe.

Yeah, I've typically recorded to a fixed tempo, occasionally making tempo map tweaks, such as slowing things down for an ending, later, but I've never really been very satisfied with the results. I guess it's like I'm trying to intellectualize what should really be felt, and not succeeding very well at approximating the latter. I'd tried the approach of creating a tempo map from a freeform performance a few times in the past in Cakewalk (or SONAR, as it was called at the time), but the process was extremely cumbersome, and usually didn't end up getting me the results I wanted anyway.

In this solo piano case, though, I pretty much knew a fixed tempo wasn't likely to give good results, but, more importantly, I had no clue what I'd play when I sat down to record something. I was "writing" at the same time as recording. (Short of sitting down to compose something with notation, something I haven't actually done in decades now, that is pretty much the only way I can do music first in that I'll forget melodies if I don't have words to trigger my memory of those melodies.) I knew what I played was too sloppy to just use as is, especially since I didn't know what I was going to do ahead of time, and a higher level concern was if I'd remember enough of what I was doing from early in the piece to make later parts of the piece feel like they were the same song.

Since I now do new recordings in Cubase, I had to figure out how to make a tempo map from an improvisation. They have an automatic feature that is supposed to do that, but it didn't even come close (it probably works okay if you have drums in your track, but that has really never been my scenario). I asked around a Cubase group, and despite most people suggesting there really wasn't a way to do it, and others questioning why I'd even consider doing something that way, one guy did point me in the right direction -- it's basically a tool that lets you drag parts of your timeline corresponding to quantize values (e.g. bars, beats, 8th notes, ...) to where you want them (e.g. to line up with a MIDI note you know should be the start of a bar), where you've locked the MIDI to real time while doing the tempo map adjustments, and it creates the tempo map changes needed to make the timeline changes work out. If you have time signature changes, you can add those, as well. Once you've got the tempo map worked out, you can change the MIDI clip back to "musical" mode (i.e. where changes you make in the tempo map later stay at the MIDI measure/beat/tic marks they were at, rather than staying where they were in absolute time), so it's easy enough to smooth things out -- even toss the tempo map altogether if you really want a fixed tempo.

For the piano pieces, with I think one exception, I mostly found myself leaving the tempo map as I'd played it, only adjusting it in places where there were obvious issues. But when I extended the approach to a Beatles song, I mostly threw out tempo changes within a section, only making variations between song sections or in areas where I definitely wanted a change, such as slowing down considerably for effect at one point.

Even independent of the not knowing what I was going to play before playing it factor, I can't imagine recording something for this sort of style with a click track. It seems to me it would need to be freer than that, and, as soon as you get to a bit that needs to slow down for effect then speed back up, the click is just a distraction as it is "off". At least this way it's possible to play through it without that distraction then decide if you want to even things out more later. What I wasn't expecting was that the approach would also be helpful for getting started on my more typical projects. It actually feels like a bit of an "aha!" moment on that front in that it might well help quite a bit in getting recordings started more quickly while maintaining more of the emotion of a live performance.

Rick

[Burnzy]

Congrats! Sounds good. I checked out your track. I submitted 9 Solo Cocktail Jazz Piano songs, and got 3 forwards. I am new, and this is only my second time getting forwarded. It's encouraging. I also submitted 6 Piano Trio tracks for the other Cocktail Jazz listing, and am hoping for the best. The ones I got forwarded are on my TAXI page, also. "Cocktail for Mom," Have a Cocktail," and "Gimme Some Cocktails."

[RPaul]

Congrats! Sounds good. I checked out your track. I submitted 9 Solo Cocktail Jazz Piano songs, and got 3 forwards. I am new, and this is only my second time getting forwarded. It's encouraging. I also submitted 6 Piano Trio tracks for the other Cocktail Jazz listing, and am hoping for the best. The ones I got forwarded are on my TAXI page, also. "Cocktail for Mom," Have a Cocktail," and "Gimme Some Cocktails."

Congratulations on your forwards, Ryan, and good luck with the ensemble ones.

I was going to ask for the link to your TAXI page to be able to have a listen, but I found it through the forwards blog (https://blog.taxi.com/forward/032621/). Good stuff.

It looks like quite a few songs got forwarded for this one -- if I counted correctly, 40 songs from 25 members. That makes me wonder how many submissions they got.

I've been a TAXI member this time around since late December 2018. I was also a member for a year back around 2010/2011. Last time I got 5 total forwards, a couple of those for my more typical stuff (i.e. songs with lyrics/vocals), but also 3 for experiments, one being a whistling tune and the other two being new age-type tracks where I was trying out my wind controller with ethnic flute sounds alongside some piano and synth pads. This one is my fifth forward this time out, with two of the others being for "positive piano-based" cues, one being an experimental electronica thing (that I'd actually put together for a listing back in my 2010/2011 stint, but which hadn't been forwarded for that one), and the other was for a 70s adult contemporary song thing. So far, nothing has resulted in any deals, no less placements.

Rick

[Ted]

Yeah Rick it's hard to get into an inspired mood with some types of music having a click going on in the background. I think there are some ways in Logic X to sync it all up after the fact and I need to look into that.

I think it would be kinda cool if a DAW could feature an "animated conductor" function. You go through and put down your anchor points on the beats (or it uses the transients) and then when you go back through the project, the little animated dude is counting out the beats as the transport scrolls, like a conductor would, with the hand signals for a nice visual cue.

[RPaul]

Yeah Rick it's hard to get into an inspired mood with some types of music having a click going on in the background. I think there are some ways in Logic X to sync it all up after the fact and I need to look into that.

I think it would be kinda cool if a DAW could feature an "animated conductor" function. You go through and put down your anchor points on the beats (or it uses the transients) and then when you go back through the project, the little animated dude is counting out the beats as the transport scrolls, like a conductor would, with the hand signals for a nice visual cue.

I'm guessing Logic Pro as some kind of similar function to what Cubase has. Cakewalk does -- it's called "set measure/beat at now time" or something like that. You place your cursor where you want a specific beat to go, then call up the function and fill in what measure number and beat number you want, then it adjusts the tempo map to make that happen. From memory, I think you have to lock any MIDI clips to absolute time first to avoid their getting messed up. It works -- in fact I used that to do the first few solo piano tracks I did for this listing since I hadn't figured out how to do it in Cubase yet (I just exported MIDI files to Cubase, then brought that into Cakewalk, did the tempo maps, and exported a MIDI file to bring back into Cubase later).

Cubase's way is much more efficient, though, because there is actually a tool, called Time Warp/Warp Grid (I'm actually in Cubase now, so I could check). When you have that tool active (also with the MIDI clips locked to absolute time), you just drag time divisions to where you want them to be -- no having to actually place a cursor and call up a dialog box to fill in. And you can change the quantization value, too, so, if you only want to do it in bar increments, you can do that, but if you want beats, you can do that, and, if you want to go even finer, such as 16th notes or some such thing, you can set the quantize division to that then use the quantize value for the "warping".

As for the animated conductor idea, I thought I'd remembered reading of something along those lines some years back, so I just did a search to see if I could find anything. Check this out:

http://www.visualconductor.com/

However, I think strongly suspect this is an old product that is no longer available as there is no links for purchase, and only an email address to contact for it. Also, just searching for it explicitly turns up a gearslutz (or similar) site with someone asking how to get one, mentioning it was something from the 90s, and there are no responses to his inquiry.

Rick