Cue of the Week: Jay Returns Home

My apologies for skipping last week. Work became a bit all-encompassing, and writing new music gets priority over celebrating old music. (Although the latter is a lot easier and more immediately gratifying.)

This week we turn to the rock side of the music spectrum, with a cue from Michele Fiore-Kaime's feature Siren. Somewhere in-between a personal growth story and and a fun "band movie", Siren's subject matter called for a contemporary score that felt stylistically compatible with the songs performed in the film.

The scene for this particular cue is just an establishing shot of the protagonist's husband pulling up into his driveway, but I kinda liked it musically. Guitar - and you'll hear me say this a lot with regards to this particular score - by the multitalented and always-chipper Tom Strahle.

Jay Returns Home

Death to Cables

Lately I've had a new obsession: ripping cables out of my studio.

This isn't as violent or destructive a process as it sounds. I'm actually taking advantage of a new-ish trend in audio technology, which is consolidating the flow of various types of informational signals in a music studio into one pathway, namely IP over your garden-variety ethernet cables.

In the 80's and 90's, a music studio meant a mass of specialized cables. You had analog audio on quarter-inch or XLR cables, digital audio on RCA or optical cables, multiple keyboards and mouses (or KVM switches to allow connecting input devices to multiple PC's), and of course a nest of the venerable MIDI cords. But with the recent trend towards software-based studios, clever developers have realized that there isn't in principle any need for this kind of diversity anymore, and have started to move all kinds of information flow into ethernet.

So nowadays I send:

-MIDI over IP (goodbye clunky MIDI interfaces with 16 cables per capita)
-Video signals over IP (I have two Dell PC displays appearing in standard Mac OSX windows)
-Keyboard/mouse signals over IP (One keyboard to rule them all! No more switchboxes.)

The final stage is sending digital audio over the network. This is easy enough if you work exclusively on one OS (either OSX or Widnows), but getting PC's to send audio to Macs is currently a tricky affair. But give it a few months, and I bet I'll have an (almost) cable-free studio.

I know that in just a few years' time, what I'm describing here as advances will be things people take for granted. Or that we'll have moved on to audio-via-telepathy, and even IP will seem quaint. But at this point in history it's all pretty exciting.

Anyone need to buy some cables?

Cue of the Week: The F-Zone - Main Titles

On previous episodes of this blog, I've played a few selections from my score for the 1999 suspense feature The F-Zone. This week I thought I'd offer the main title cue, which introduces the film's theme.

The oboe solo comes courtesy of the talented multi-instrumentalist Jon Clarke. Jon also played the bass recorder on the Llamas and the Federal Reserve cue which I posted last December. Jon owns about six of every wind instrument under the sun, and his collection is quite a sight to behold. Of course, the entire ensemble was comprised of some fantastic players; it's hard to go wrong when recording with Los Angeles union musicians. (Though on occasion I've done my best to try.)

The F-Zone Main Titles

Cue of the Week: The Word

This is the final cue from the Anthem audiobook series, an accompaniment the narrator's resolute final monologue, concluding in his pronouncement of the forbidden word. (You'll have to read the book to find out what it is.) Musically speaking, this cue gives a final statement of the score's central theme, and provides a sense of closure for the overall story.

The Word

I hope you've enjoyed these cues as much as I enjoyed airing them out. But enough literary erudition; next week we'll return to film music proper.