GALAXY Soundtrack update

I’ve had an interesting time working on a new piece for the GALAXY Soundtrack. My usual approach to music is to combine pencil and score paper with Finale, i.e., software, and do the traditional ‘composer’ thing, with notes and barlines and all that stuff.

But for this piece I wanted to be able to use synth sounds and to control the reverb, etc., so I opened up GarageBand and started playing with it, exploring all the sounds (and making copious notes of which ones might work) and scraping out an ABORTIVE ATTEMPT or two.

Then a strange thing happened. I’d worked out a chord progression that interested me, and I was noodling around on the keyboard getting a sense of how one chord led to another, continuing to explore synthesizer sounds, when it occurred to me that I could literally just hit RECORD and noodle my way through the chords and let the little tinkly arpeggiated bells do the hard work for me.

You don’t know how scary this is for me. I am a composer, with notes and barlines and stuff, not a performer, and certainly not a keyboardist of any ability. Improvising this piece will be a Hero’s Journey for sure, and you know what I say about that: “Sometimes you eat the Minotaur, sometimes the Minotaur eats you. Sometimes the Hero’s Journey ends in ashes.” (p.84)

::deep breath::

In lighter news, the equipment for the silent disco arrived and I’ve had a great time setting it up and testing it. It’s going to be amazing: a tiny little transmitter with ten headsets, and an even tinier mp3 player to pump the music. The whole transmitter set-up is less than eight inches square. I used my big battery/charger last night to power the transmitter and was super pleased to see that after five hours of playing, the charge level never got below full charge. Thus my biggest concern has been solved.

Now my biggest concern is building a storage/display case for it so it can sit out in the field with GALAXY.