First Piece of 2009!

[yammer107]

"That magical moment where the main character get his inspirational vision that sets the plot afoot" ~Chris

[leejohnson]

Hey Mazz, nice work and good job getting the F...I asume thats a good F as in Forward, not as in what I got in school growing up...LOLI am not familiar with the composer you mentioned, nor this style. It sounds great and I can hear it in a variety of situations! I am very interested to learn what types of hardware/software etc...you use to get your sounds? I don't know much about this type of recording process...but eager to learn a little about it so I may be able to fuse very sublte elements of this type of orchestration in other styles I am working on...Feel like divulging any info on your gear, your process etc...?BestLee

[mazz]

Hi Lee,Thanks for listening.I have a lot of gear, I'm one of the resident gear-heads here so I'll refer you to a link on my website with a fairly complete list (scroll down a bit to get to the list):http://www.johnmazzei.com/newsThe process for this piece was inspired by the listing and also my knowledge of the music of the composers mentioned in the listing (Thomas Newman, Steve Reich, Michael Nyman, etc.). Thomas Newman is one of the top film composers on the scene today (cousin of Randy Newman, BTW). He has done tons of films you might have heard of: Shawshank Redemption, American Beauty, The Player, The Green Mile and on and on. I love his sense of orchestration and his ability to blend the acoustic and electronic.I wrote a sketch of the melody and possible harmonic structure on a piece of music paper during my lunch break at my day gig and then proceed to play it in to the computer when I got home and alter it as it went along. The electronic elements were chosen based on the vibe I wanted to create while I kept the Thomas Newman-esque feel in my mind. Even though this piece is completely MIDI generated, I record all my parts as audio when I get them edited the way I want. It makes it easier to mix because I turn off all of my VI's, which leaves more CPU available for plug-ins. If I find an issue with a track and need to re-record it, I just turn that VI back on and fix it and re-track it to audio. Another reason for doing this is that it makes the tracks compatible with pretty much any system. If I switch to a different DAW or my system crashes or I want to mix at a different facility, I can just take my audio tracks and continue working on them (they're backed up on a separate drive after every session). If a virtual instrument or plug-in becomes obsolete, I still have that part available as audio. Since I use 2 outboard computers in conjunction with my Mac DAW, I have them connected with ADAT lightpipe cables and they show up as inputs on audio tracks in my DAW on my Mac (Digital Performer). On one computer I'm running XP 64 bit OS with EW Play version of Platinum Orchestra and on another I'm running Kontakt 2 with Kirk Hunter Orchestra and Elite Percussion and some other things as well. On the Mac I usually run Stylus, Omnisphere, Kontakt and other stuff as necessary.That's all for now.Thanks for listening!!Mazz