2016 - Phew!!!

Busy times here at Tumbledown...Recently finished the music for Ireland with Ardal O'Hanlon which began showing on 14th December at 9pm on more4. It was a great show to work on with director Christopher Bruce and editor Laurence Williamson. I've worked with both of them often before, but this is the first time we've all worked together. It's a three times one hour show..."Comic actor Ardal O’Hanlon, explores the Emerald Isle and Irish life as he goes off the beaten track around his beloved homeland." It's had some really nice reviews...

“Intelligent, witty” The Observer
“Ardal…. a cheerful and mischievous guide” THE TIMES
“What a treat…wryly amusing and perceptive” Radio Times 
“It’s engaging stuff, thanks in no small measure to the smart, drily laconic Ardal O’Hanlon.” The Guardian. 
“Ardal asks who the real Irish are….with surprising results” THE DAILY MAIL
“Top 6 watches this week” The Irish Times

PICK OF THE DAY...
THE SUNDAY TIMES, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, THE TIMES, THE GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, THE IRISH INDEPENDENT, THE IRISH TIMES.

Studio news...I've just updated to a new MacBook Pro. I thought I'd be a couple of weeks setting it up, but I had all my files, passwords and system settings transferred over in an hour and a half. Getting the computer to talk to to the desk was a bit trickier and there were a couple of things that would have saved me time if I knew. They are to do with updating the OS...If you use ethernet with Avid hardware, you'll have to download a new AX88179 USB 3.0 to Gigabit Ethernet driver and then update Eucontrol to 3.5 and update the firmware in each unit. 

A nice side effect of the new computer is that the screen is much larger than the old one and is a usable extra monitor. So I've shuffled things around a bit and the computer now sits between the desk and the keyboards, so I can pop instrument plug-ins on it for easy auditioning of sounds and it frees up some space from the two main monitors!!! It's now all working just as the old one was, so it's time to update to Cubase 9 and get a few more nice sounds. I've been really pleased with the Spitfire sounds I've recently bought in, so I'll look at some more of those. Spectrasonics Keyscape looks very impressive too.

A quick look at the past year shows that it's been a busy one with lots of music...Some nice TV projects and nine albums for Artful, several albums and part albums for Mindfulness, Compendium, Gold Leaf and Apollo. Also, I began some exciting collaborations with Percy Jones (Brand X, MJ12, Brian Eno) and Monti (Curve, Jesus And Mary Chain, Ian Dury) which will continue next year. Here are a few album covers from the past 12 months...

I realised with a bit of a shock that I spent nearly a whole month in the USA this year and will probably do the same next year...Hopefully, I'll have a better idea of what's going on in Major League Baseball on my next visit which will be in April!!! I had a meal in a bar on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica whilewatching the Cubs vs Indians game and found myself really getting into it. The Cubs broke a 70 year plus drought of wins, so it was very exciting. Baseball is full of nerdy stats and is therefore right up my street.

Looking forward to next year, I'm already working on the next albums for Artful and Butiq as well as one for another new label which will go live next year...I'm really excited about that as it's a new imprint from a really cool record label with some fantastic well established and new artists.

And finally, here's a playlist of some music!!!

Vintage radio and thatching...

I've been really enjoying BBC Radio4ex recently...It features vintage radio shows and series in various genres, my favourite being comedy and sci-fi. I turned on the radio the other day to hear the familiar voice of Irene Handl in a show called We're In Business also starring Harry Worth, Peter Jones and Dick Emery. It was a really good comedy...A bit surreal so I wasn't too surprised to hear that it was scripted by Barry Took, Marty Feldman and Peter Jones himself. It was followed by Meet The Huggets and I was struck by the fact that both had fantastic full orchestral themes and incidental music.

Sadly, I can't find out much about We're In Business, but Meet The Huggets was very popular and started out as a series of Gainsborough films with music by Anthony Hopkins...I can't find out who was at the helm during the radio years.

Radio music was fantastic back then, recorded by up to huge ensembles and composed by people like Wally Stott who was a brilliant composer.

Which brings me on to a new development I've been noticing recently, which I find completely baffling. There have been a few releases recently of software which claim to compose chord sequences, basslines and melodies and also to be some sort of aid in understanding music theory. Unfortunately, the ones I have heard seem to be programmed by someone who doesn't know much music theory as they produce a slew of wrong notes over an extremely rudimentary and uninteresting chord sequence. Quite apart from that, the basic assumption is that music theory is a black and white presentation of rules which must be adhered to. Like most things in life, music theory has many grey, or rather flexible  areas...After all, it's a way of understanding acoustics in a way as defined by western diatonic music which is a thing based on wind and wire. It therefore has to be a flexible and living thing, which in turn, is why so many beautiful things can be done with it. It's a force of nature, which is why it speaks to us all.

I reckon that the reason us composers write music is to communicate how we feel, so to get a machine to throw out a series of notes rather than to have an experience, process it yourself and then communicate something of worth seems pointless to me. Much better to listen to lots of different music, experiment and learn some sort of formal theory, if you ask me...Much more interesting too!!! Anyway, I'll stop there.

The TV show I'm writing the music for threw down a very interesting sound challenge which I'll write more about in a future blog. I'll just say that it involved a lot of editing in Melodyne. The show has been great to work on...An excellent and very experienced team and a terrific presenter and subject matter...Brilliant!!! I can't say any more until the show has been finished and scheduled, but I'll post more when I can.

I'm working on a new 'classical' piece. It's called "Three Illustrations in Colour" and is for quite a large orchestra, two harps and female chorus. Debussy used the same forces in his Nocturnes and the soundscape he conjured up with those forces has always fascinated me. I've nearly completed what will probably be the last piece which is Village Fête and Thunderclouds. It is exactly the sort of piece that would fit in the Multiple Field Sketches, but it has (very unusually for me) lyrics, so it needed its own setting. I'm reworking Blood Moon and Monitor from the Field Sketches as a first movement and still thinking about what should go between them. You can even get apps to work this sort of thing out for you too, but one of the best things about composing I feel, is holding all these things in your head and mulling over how the ideas fit together and bounce off each other to make a greater whole.

We have the thatchers in here at Tumbledown and we're gradually learning the language of the craft. We're having a flush rather than a block ridge and we're not having pinnacles, despite their function of keeping witches away. The thatchers are here most days unless they're yelming the straw before bringing it here to put up on the roof (pic above).

There's a new Artful release coming soon as well as The Lost Lake, my second album for Mindfulness Music.

New gig...

Very busy time here...I've got the job of writing music for a show which is going to be presented by one of my favourite actor/comedians exploring one of my favourite places and will be working with one of my favourite directors and one of my favourite editors. To top it all, I got the job with my favourite agent...Thanks AJA!!! :-) I'll post full details when I'm able to and the press releases go out.

So, I've been getting a bit ahead with Artful releases which has meant a lot of mastering and editing, as well as writing about 30 tracks for other publishers and a meditation album...Phew.

I've also started a 'classical' piece called Village Fête and Thunderclouds, which is my take on current times and Brexit etc... It's for large orchestra and female chorus and I might make it part of a three movement piece.

I've put some sheet music up at http://garryjudd.musicaneo.com as some people have asked to see the scores of Field Sketches and The Green Man and there is some free stuff there too. The Piano arrangement of Elegies (and Energies) is also there...This was the last score which I finessed in Sibelius and I'm now totally writing notation with Staffpad.

Dropbox

I've recently become a power Dropbox user and a big fan since my return from the USA.

Since then (and thanks to the meetings I had over there) I've been writing music for several different publishers and I've found that Dropbox is a fantastic tool to distribute the music to them. So, I now have Dropbox folders for each of my publishers and clients, so I can simply just drop a finished piece into the right folder and it'll find its way to London, LA or Copenhagen etc..., almost like having a network of wormholes from one place to the other. :-)

I also use it to sync files between The Artful Corporation computers and, on a more micro level, to sync files between my Mac and my laptop PC, which I use for music metadata.

Dropbox also comes in handy for sending music to directors/editors...The other day I was contacted by an editor who wanted to use one of my pieces on a TV show. I opened up and shared a folder with him, dropped the piece of music in the folder and it was on his timeline within seconds. Better still, the folder is still active, so I now have a solid method of transfer now set up for the next time he needs something.

A couple of other things I've found is that if you want to send a set of pieces to someone all in one go, you can upload them as they are finished one by one to the main directory of Dropbox and then move them en masse to the destination folder...They'll then show up together instantly at the remote end as they're already present on the Dropbox servers and don't need to be uploaded to be moved. It's also fun to export finished demos or masters directly into the destination Dropbox folder...You can't get hotter off the press than that!!!

One final use I've been trying out is as a collaboration tool. I have a folder shared with a fellow composer so we can work on the same files directly...Great stuff!!!

Back in the UK

Just returned from the USA...Had lots of very promising meetings about future work and I'll be returning in mid-October. I started with a week in LA, followed by a train trip to San Diego to visit family and then ended up in Las Vegas for NAB to meet a lot of my international sub-publishers.

My timing was good, as I'd just missed a week of rain. The locals were very pleased to have had the rain, but having just left a wet and windy London, I was very pleased to enjoy the Sun!!! My second day of meetings was in mostly in Venice and I had a wonderful stroll up the boardwalk. I'll be going again in October and will be based mostly in Santa Monica which I'm really looking forward to. This time I was mostly in Beverly Hills (which is well positioned for meetings) and a couple of days Downtown, before heading off to San Diego via Union Station. That station is really quite something and I really enjoy sitting in those comfy leather sofas and watching the world go by.

So I could carry on working, I took my basic portable set up which is...

Macbook Air running Cubase and various other audio plug-ins/programs.
M-Audio Keystation Mini.

When space isn't at a premium, I can also take...

Lacie 500Gig SSD containing more sound libraries.

...and if space is even less at a premium...

Focusrite Scarlett Studio interface, and the Hohner Steinberger guitar and bass...And a mic and other instruments, if needed.

I've had a lot of music released recently...Firstly, my orchestral album Field Sketches is at...
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/field-sketches-for-orchestra/id1098018916

The rerecorded and remastered On Vacation is here...
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/on-vacation/id1095859419

...and a couple of compilations containing only my music are On The Orient Express...
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/on-orient-express-deluxe-chilled/id1102512389

...and Sands Of Meditation...
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/sands-meditation-calming-music/id1098832225

I also have music on new releases from Gold Leaf and Artful and wrote the theme and incidental music for as TV programme called Take Two, which features interview with British screen legends...People I've admired for ages, so it was a thrill to do!!!

Running a 66 piece orchestral session with StaffPad…

I recently had a 66 piece orchestral session and decided to produce all scores and parts with StaffPad alone. This is stretching the purpose of the software which is intended really for inputting via handwriting recognition, but because I need to produce scores and parts quickly, I thought I’d try a quicker workflow to see how things went. I’d already slipped a couple of scores and sets of parts from StaffPad alongside the usual Sibelius finished ones into an earlier and smaller session and I had no complaints from the conductor or musicians, so I had great confidence that it’d work OK!!! The music project was one of my own for Compendium Recordings, so there were no deadline problems to encounter, but I could use any experience for future work where deadlines will be important.

The workflow was this…

Write score in StaffPad.

‘Print’ score and parts to .pdf.

Proof parts on Mac, make changes to Staffpad score on Surface.

Print A4 score for me.

‘Print’ A3 and A4 score and parts to .pdf.

Zip up and send to orchestra.

I printed the first score on paper for the proofing session, but I thought I’d save a tree and proof on two screens for future scores.

I’ve sent a couple of suggestions of things that would make things easier to StaffPad and look forward to those appearing soon, but generally speaking, the experience was incredibly easy and efficient.

Mixing is now well underway and there'll not be great amount of editing as the orchestra were fantastic. I've had a dry run at mastering some music and the results are great (though I say so myself!!!), even at this early stage...Here is a link...

https://soundcloud.com/garry-judd/multiple-field-sketches-excerpts

Green Men, Kingfishers and arranging with StaffPad

The Green Man orchestral suite is now available on iTunes by clicking on this link...

The album also includes a piano arrangement of Elegies (and Energies) from Book 2 of Multiple Field Sketches for small orchestra. When I decided to make this piano reduction, it occurred to me that I could do this in situ alongside the original orchestral arrangement in StaffPad. This would mean that I could refer to the score as I proceeded into the piece and even copy and paste parts into the piano arrangement. So, I copied the StaffPad orchestral version, opened it and subtitled it 'piano arrangement' so I had two new identical versions. There may be an easier way of doing this...Maybe the StaffPad people could enlighten me, but I wanted to preserve the orchestral version as it was and this was the best way I could figure out to do that.

I then added a piano part to the new version and found that it was a delight to work on this while referring to the original version alongside it. Copying and pasting worked a treat...In 'Elegies' there are some pretty complex cross rhythmic hemiolas which would have been a bit of a task to replicate and I found the new lasso to select function very useful. Pasting selections into different voices is, necessarily, a bit fiddly as you have to keep selecting the right voices to copy and then paste into, but StaffPad intelligently sorted the beam directions (even in interweaving parts) and made the job easy.

Before very long, I had a complete piano arrangement and I then deleted all the other instruments...Fantastic!!! If you do this from a fully notated (with directions and dynamics), these can be copied and pasted in with the actual music.

I'm currently working on some arrangements for large orchestra and am working in a similar way, except I added the new instruments to the orchestral score resulting in a sort of semi-filled template.

Of course, like all music where there is a possibility of copying and pasting, you have to guard against being lazy and think about whether the voicing and timbres will work when one part is transferred to another instrument, but that's what being a composer is all about, isn't it???

We had a huge thrill recently when we spotted a kingfisher diving for beetles in the pond. It's a couple of years since we removed the Koi carp that we inherited (they were not doing well as the water was not properly filtered for them, so we found them a lovely new home) and removed the leaky liner to make it into a natural wildlife pond. It took a couple of weeks, during which we smelled permanently of silt, but we've ben really pleased to see all sorts of wildlife make their home in there...Great diving beetles, water boatmen, greater crested newts, dragonfly larva are all in there and there are often ducks and moorhen on it. The kingfisher was a real surprise...We're not sure where it comes from, but there are larger areas of running water nearby where it must make its home.

Keeping in touch with nature...

Writing and recording music can be a very esoteric enterprise and it's easy to lose touch with the natural world. Living in a thatched cottage in a tiny hamlet is a lovely way to keep 'grounded'. For example: This is the time of year when it's good to have a tidy up in the garden and have a bonfire to get rid of any branches and twigs that have fallen and been collected with any other garden rubbish. It's also the time I tend to get rid of any royalty sheets/accountancy stuff that we're no longer required to keep, so I literally 'cook the books' on the bonfire. This is where nature stuff like the wind direction comes in. We normally have a southerly wind here, which would blow any smoke back towards us and our neighbours, So, when the wind turns round to the north (usually bringing colder weather) conditions are ideal for a good burn up.

This happened yesterday and I soon had a good blaze going with the smoke giving our neighbour across the field a wide berth and continuing into the open countryside beyond. I took the opportunity to get some of the cut logs that have been seasoning down the end of the garden beyond the summer house and split them ready for the cold snap that the wind was bringing. 

Log splitting with a heavy maul is a very satisfying thing, especially when all goes well and the log splits in half first time with a lovely crack...A bit like hitting a six in cricket, or I suppose a home run in baseball. There is a sort of 'Murphy's Law' with logs which states that the smaller and flimsier a log looks, the harder it is to split. The only thing more welcome than a clean 'six' is the first proper cracking noise a stubborn log makes after a sustained battering!!!

All this is a nice contrast to wiring up the legacy rack and the second monitor in the studio. The rear speakers are in their permanent home on their new brackets made by a local metalwork/blacksmithing friend. On the musical side, Artful released a new disk last week which is now available worldwide and I'm at the final stages of mastering my first classical release for Compendium Recordings.

Snow followed the northerly wind overnight...It didn't settle for long despite cold temperatures and ice on the pond. This is also the time of year that our thoughts turn to warmer climes and we begin to plan the annual trip to LA and Vegas. I'll be in LA from 11th for five days before heading off to Vegas via San Diego. I'll probably be back in LA in October.

Meet Edgar...

I'm all for things which can make more time for composing and Edgar has proved to be very useful in that regard.

It's a way of posting to social media from a library of posts which you can add to when you have time, and then schedule those posts to a timetable, rather than have to think them up and post them on the fly.

It's incredibly easy to use...The way of adding to the library of posts has been particularly well thought out and makes the process very straightforward. This makes it easier to come up with posts that will really interest your followers. Posts can be grouped into types...ie. 'promotional' and 'funny/inspirational' and then scheduled by type and social media accounts via a grid. Accounts can be with Facebook (including pages), Twitter and LinkedIn.

All in all, great stuff!!!

That Which Rolls and a notable placement...

Delighted that my track, Easter Bells has been placed in the feature film, The Forest, starring Natalie Dormer. This suspense-filled supernatural thriller was directed by Jason Zada and will be on release in the USA from 8th January 2016...Many thanks to my fantastic US sub-publisher, 5 Alarm for all their hard work!!!

...EVERYONE COMES HERE LOOKING FOR A WAY OUT...

Along with a couple of TV commissions, I'm working on the latest orchestral sessions which took place a few weeks ago. This will complete the suite, The Green Man which will be available on Compendium Recordings soon.

Here's another transcription from the mini-Molseskine notebook. It's called That Which Rolls for harp, string quartet, flute and Bb clarinet and is a tribute to Alfred Jarry and his bicycle which he called, "That Which Rolls." I wrote it when I was out and about discovering the footpaths and bridleways around Much Hadham shortly after we moved from Hertford.

HERE is a link to the score and a StaffPad realisation of the music (unmastered) follows...

The Shipping Forecast On Lundy

My recent post about the English Experimentalists reminded me about a piece I had secreted away in a mini Moleskine notebook. I use the notebook for general notes, but it also has a couple of complete pieces in it. One of which was a piece I wrote in 2011 on the island of Lundy which is slap in the middle of the Bristol Channel between Devon and Wales. The picture above is of the piece being written in situ. HERE are a set of photos of the piece in the notebook. As you can see, the notation is quite 'experimental' in that the string orchestra and oboe parts are notated separately which enables the piece to be notated in relatively few pages. I wanted to make an aural snapshot of the island and the beautiful but bracing clear air and skies that we were lucky to have in our time there.

This was back in 2011 before I'd become a devotee of the Herman Miller Aeron chair and I'd given myself a bad back by sitting for hours in front of the computer and mixing desk on a cheap office chair. We visited Lundy one Spring with a bunch of friends and I found I couldn't keep up with them yomping about the island, so I would find a nice vantage point over the sea, make musical notes and listen to the radio. I'm a Shipping Forecast fan and I was listening to it on BBC Radio 4 one day and realised that I was actually IN one of the places that was being mentioned in it.

I transcribed the piece more normally, so the piece runs from beginning to end with all parts in line. Here is an .mp3 share directly from StaffPad with a link to the StaffPad .pdf score.

Link to score

Link to score


Link to score

English Experimental Music

I became aware of the music of the English Experimentalists through visits to the BMIC, back when it was situated in Stratford Place off Oxford Street in London. It was run by Roger Wright (later Controller of BBC Radio 3) and was a real centre of contemporary music. I met Percy Grainger's biographer, John Bird there and Hans Keller was often studying scores at one of the benches.

The BMIC was a repository of scores as well as a venue (my Three Knobblers for Piano was played there by Leslie Howard together with pieces by Leonard Salzedo and Alan Bush) and looking around the scores, I became aware of a type of music that appealed to me. At the time, serial/atonal music was the order of the day, so when I heard the music of John White, Gavin Bryars, Benedict Mason, Dave Smith, The Garden Furniture Ensemble and others, it instantly appealed to me.

Their music was largely tonal, although chance and systems were part of their make up...Some scores were text (or graphic) only. HERE is an excellent piece about John White's piano sonatas and HERE, is Gavin Bryars biog. There are plentiful articles on the English Experimentalists on the internet.

Through the BMIC, I was lucky enough to meet a few of them and John White, Gavin Bryars and Benedict Mason were very kind to me...I must have been a bit of a pain turning up and questioning them about their work, but they were very helpful. I went to quite a few concerts...One at Huddersfield Music Festival (which repeated at the ICA in London) was particularly memorable, with performances of some John White symphonies and Gavin Bryars' Ponukelian Melody.

Later, at university, us students were asked to give a lecture on any (musical) subject. My lecture was called, 'Atonality is a red herring,' and concerned my belief that music wouldn't progress by merely getting more tonally complex to the point where there was no central tonality, but it would progress by the changing of attitudes to how and why it was composed. I cited my main influences which were Percy Grainger, Erik Satie and the English Experimentalists.

I still think the same way and feel that in my 'serious' music, I'm getting close to those thoughts I set out all that time ago. Pieces like Elegies (and Energies), Scatterbird and Power Harrow in the Multiple Field sketches are coming together very nicely and I'm looking forward to recording them soon.

In other news, I've been very busy writing music for LEXI which is a graphics system which explains the category system for the Rio Paralympics and other IPC games. This will be shown worldwide and is a very exciting project.

Also, I've been writing a string quartet arrangement for a pop recording. I wrote the arrangement in Staffpad and then tempo mapped the original demo and imported the Staffpad arrangement as a MIDI file...Worked very well...I'm just finalising the arrangement before printing the parts for the session.

Just starting a mastering session for the next Artful project...

Editing...

Please note that this is an older post that didn't get published!!!

Lovely weather here in Hertfordshire, so I've been able to work outside. Here's a nice spot on the new patio which catches the Sun in the mornings before it hides behind the big field maple next door. I had a lovely sunny editing session here before transferring back to the main spot at the back of the cottage and then remained there all afternoon.

Editing isn't my favourite part of the job, but it was very pleasant under the parasol with the sound of conbine harvesters moving to and fro in the background. A wood pigeon kept swooping low over my head as it collected sticks from around the pond for the nest it's building in the big oak in the front garden.

Earlier, I'd loaded up Cubase Pro 8 onto the Surface thinking that it might be convenient to edit on. I thought that the pen might be a more intuitive way of moving the music to the correct length and drawing in the fades. Sadly, it wasn't to be as Cubase defaults to a screen resolution which made editing fiddly and also the audio insisted on coming out through the speakers rather than the headphones I'd plugged in. I'm sure that this is easily resolved after a bit of tinkering, but I'm up against a deadline and haven't got time to mess around. It'd be great to use the Surface for editing...Apart from the possible advantage of using the pen, it'd be much easier to use on, say, a plane. I've done a bit of editing on long haul flights, but on a laptop with the constant worry that the passenger in front might recline their seat, probably shattering the laptop screen in the process!!!

I posted about moving Multiple Field Sketches to Staffpad...I'll be doing these scores as final versions, i.e. No polishing with Sibelius. While it's really useful to go into Sibelius via .musicxml files for extra neatness, it does add a considerable amount of time to completing a score. The whole idea of the MFSs was to put down ideas quickly, so that's what I'll be doing. The scores and parts will be perfectly readable. I'm planning some more orchestral sessions soon, so maybe the recently finished Power Harrow will find itself as part of those.

I've recently finished a rerecord/remaster of On Vacation, an album I originally recorded *cough* years ago, This will be available on iTunes etc... very soon and also via www.chillvillemusic.com .

I'm also starting a 'classical' record label. When we recorded Leslie Howard's two albums for Artful, Leslie also recorded some music by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Grieg. It was always my intention to put these out digitally via a new label, Compendium Records. The first Leslie Howard album will be followed up by some original compositions by Leslie and a further album containing some orchestral music by myself. More news on this soon.

Runner beans are now on stream (my favourite veg) and the sweetcorn is swelling nicely and should crop soon. The sound of combines have been toing and froing day and night despite a few interruptions due to rain.

I had a holiday!!!

We've not had a proper holiday for ages...We've always taken short breaks when we've been travelling for business, but decided it was about time to have a proper do-nothing holiday.

So we booked a week in Sardinia, and very nice it was too...As you can see from the pic above, the scenery was stunning and the hotel and food was very nice indeed. It wasn't quite a do-nothing holiday, as I took the Surface pro 3/Staffpad along and did a bit of writing...But that's how I relax, so it was allowed!!!

While we were there, I read two books...Gone Girl (having seen the film last year for BAFTA) and The Martian. The book made it plain that there was an upcoming film coming soon and within a week of returning home, I got tickets to the London premiere. There was the usual embarrasment of walking up the portion of the red carpet that everyone has to with the reporters thinking, "Paul Hollywood has let himself go," but we got in to find that it was in 3D. I liked the film, but wasn't too sure about the 3D. Anyway, a nice evening out with a very good dry Martini in the Hampshire Hotel on Leicester Sq.

I've just launched a new classical imprint...Compendium Recordings and our first release is Leslie Howard plays Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Grieg and it is available HERE . The next releases will be Études in Black and White op.47 played and composed by Leslie Howard and then The Green Man and excerpts from Multiple Field Sketches, by me.

Also in progress are the latest album for Artful and a very interesting international TV project which I'll tell more about at a later date. I'm also planning two more orchestral sessions, one of which will definitely be this side of 2016...I'm busy with the score and part making right now.

As far as Tumbledown goes, it's definitely the last days of Summer with Autumn knocking on the door pretty hard. The leaves have begin to fall and there is a distinct chill in the air. I'll soon be adding to the Autumnal atmosphere by having a bonfire of the pile of tree and shrub trimmings while chopping up firewood for the winter (chainsaw maintenance needed!!!). We'll be self sufficient in firewood for another year as there is still a plentiful supply right down the end of the garden.

The vegetable patch is changing seasons...The runner beans are nearly finished as are the courgettes, chilli, sweetcorn and tomatoes. The leeks are fattening up, but we have an absence of parsnips as they didn't germinate, or were eaten by mice...Not sure which. I've rather taken to peppermint tea, so we're drying leaves to have over winter and the damson gin (first crop of damsons from our new tree) has been made and left to brew.

Staffpad again!!!

I was about eight years old when I wrote down my first piece of music...Biro on manuscript paper. By the time I was fourteen and had decided I wanted to be a professional composer, I had become used to pencil on paper and continued writing in that way until now.

My recordings have benefitted from technology since I started writing music for media...MIDI and digital recording have made it possible for me to write and record a huge amount of work over the years.

Now, technology has made it possible for me to write with an active pen onto a tablet to produce beautifully notated scores which, most importantly, can be made to produce parts in a couple of clicks.

So, at this point in this book of continuing experiments, Multiple Field Sketches, Book 2, I'm moving my notational efforts to Staffpad on Microsoft Pro 3.

I just have sixteen bars to fill out before I can upload images of the remaining pencil on paper manuscripts for MFS, but will be continuing on Staffpad until then.

I'll miss sharpening the pencils.

The music above is the first page of "Power Harrow" the first fully non-paper Multiple Field Sketch.

Busy...

Vale Of White Horse - May 2015

It's been a busy few weeks and great fun...Here's what I've been up to...

• Orchestral session went well and I am now mixing the files.

• Went to see Bill Lawrence at the Union Chapel with my composer friend Peter Aagaard...Great stuff with two Snarky Pups in the line up.

• MIDEM in Cannes...Met up with lots of publisher friends and made some new...Fantastic weather and an amazing room at the Carlton.

• A very enjoyable visit to Copenhagen to see my friends at Apollo Music followed by a fantastic meal at the Tivoli Gardens and a go on the Dæmonen rollercoaster!!!

StaffPad continues to amaze...The new version has made flats much more easily recognised and the selection of signs and symbols has been made much more intuitive. I had an instrumental session (trumpet and oboe/Cor Anglais) last week, so I tried writing the parts/scores and printing them out directly from StaffPad with great success. I even imported a couple of the pieces into StaffPad from Cubase via a MIDI file, tidied it up and used it as the starting point for writing the parts out for the session. One of my instrumentalists was amazed at the power of it and could see how useful it would be to have, particularly for her teaching work.

The veg patch is producing nicely...We've had asparagus, potatoes, garlic, courgette, strawberries, shallots onions, spinach and chard. The weather has been alternately hot and wet, so growing conditions are very good

USA, StaffPad and Jack-in-the-Green

It's hard to believe that my visit to the US was about a month ago as it's been a very busy time since.NAB in Las Vegas was fantastic and I met lots of my publishers from around the world and made some great new contacts too. I then met up with friends and family and had a few meetings in Los Angeles before returning home. I made the trip with my brother, agent and sometime publisher, Aaron.

Since then, I've written another album for Artful which I'm please to say has been very well received by my publishers around the world. I've also been writing and prepping scores and parts for an orchestral session which is coming up soon. I've been using StaffPad to write the music and then prepping the score and parts in Sibelius. It took a while to work out how detailed I could be before transferring to Sibelius with MusicXML, but I now have a good workflow worked out. I now have the updated version of StaffPad, so I'll enjoy seeing how much more work I can do with it.

One problem I was having with StaffPad was in writing flats. The new version has improved recognition of flats written with two strokes (which is what I have always done), so hopefully this will be a great improvement for me. Sharps were also tricky, until I worked out that StaffPad liked them written flat on, rather than at a jaunty angle as I usually write them on paper. Anyway, I'll be writing more with StaffPad soon and will review the new version when I've given it a good try out.One of the pieces for the orchestral session was inspired by a visit to the Mayday celebrations in Highworth, Wiltshire which we visited a couple of weeks ago. 

About one hundred and eighty years ago, my Great Great Great Grandad and Grandma, James and Hannah Judd left the town of Highworth in Wiltshire to try their luck in the City Of London. Unfortunately, they soon found out that the streets weren’t paved with gold, but they began the line of North London Judds, which I am part of.I've always wanted to see a Jack-in-the-Green Mayday parade...This is where someone inside a framework which is covered in leaves and greenery (looking rather like an Xmas tree, see pic above) parades around the town accompanied by characters like Sap-Engro and Copperface. It just happens that Highworth has this very celebration, so what with the family connection, it seemed a must to go. 

It was a proper old-fashioned day out, with a Punch and Judy show, Morris dancing, Jack-in-the-Green followed by beating the bounds and a great live band in the square after.

So, 'Highworth Jack-in-the-Green 2015' is one of the pieces which will be recorded in a couple of weeks.

Home!!!

Had a fantastic time in the USA meeting old and new friends in the music publishing world. I've returned to find that the garden has really taken off...Here is some cherry blossom that has come out in the past few days.

StaffPad and Surface and Sibelius.

My review of the new notation recognition software seemed to go down well...Thanks to everyone who shared and retweeted. I've also demonstrated it to several composer friends from the UK and USA. I noticed that Sibelius are promising an upgrade which will take more advantage of the Surface facilities, but I don't think this will include handwriting recognition. Stuart Pitts from the Surface team at Microsoft was kind enough to retweet and looking at his timeline reminded me that the Surface is a fully featured Windows 8 computer and will quite happily handle Sibelius too. So, one of my next projects will be to load it up and see how the workflow can be handled between the programs on the same machine.

Incidentally, I handed the Surface to my cousin who is an artist when I visited my family in Southern California last week. She thought that it was the nearest thing to real watercolour and paper that she had ever tried...This was FreshPaint which came pre-installed. The first thing on my wishlist for the Surface is that they produce one which is two or for times as big so you can set it up like drawing board...Would be great for composers, artists, architects etc... alike!!!

It's occurred to me that the Surface has accomplished something I have managed to do with my recording desk, which is to create a familiar hands on user interface which has the power of digital underneath. I'm still figuring out how to fit the Surface into the studio...It would be great if Avid (who produce Sibelius and the Artist Control series) could get the Sibelius transport (and possibly the mixer functions) to be controllable by the Artist Series hardware.

Ping.

It's been pointed out to me by a fellow composer and publisher who has fitted a fully functioning studio into an RV, that the length of ping from dish to satellite makes it impossible for collaboration to take place using Cubase Connect Pro. So, time to rethink the internet collection here in Much Hadham.

StaffPad - A Revelation

I've always considered myself very lucky to be around at the time when music technology really took off. Without MIDI and computers, my output of recorded music would have been much smaller.

With instrumental sessions and my written 'serious' music however, it has been more of a struggle to get the music in a state to be played. I started my career writing music with a pencil onto paper. It's the way I mostly visualise all my music as I make it, so it's great to just grab a pencil and just write it down. The problem with this, of course, is that you have to write it all out again when you need parts.

I've had the scoring program Sibelius through several different versions...I'm now on 7.5 and it has vastly improved over the years. However, excellent though it is, I find it a real effort to write music with it. Give me a pencil and paper and I'll happily forget lunch, but having to drag notes onto a staff or play notes in manually and editing them is just not fun. NotateMe was great, but it was still not quite intuitive as the handwriting recognition took place in a different 'window' rather than in situ.

So, when I heard about David William Hearn's StaffPad, I was very interested indeed. It's an app which allows the composer to write music with a pen onto a tablet screen. The music looks like handwritten music when input by the pen, but when the end of the bar is reached, it snaps into proper engraved music notation. The price of the app itself is a very reasonable $69.99...I'm sure they could charge a lot more, but the bad news is that the only hardware that can cope with this is the Microsoft Surface (ideally the i5, 259GB Pro 3 version). It's the active pen which makes the difference.

A couple of years ago, I moved over to Apple products and have since become quite an annoying Mac enthusiast. The thought of having to buy a Microsoft machine for one app was a bit of a leap, but the lure of being able to write music so intuitively was simply too much. So I went and bought myself a Surface and here is how it went...

My first hour or so with the Surface was very frustrating. I had a terrible job trying to get my UK Microsoft account to work out that I was in the USA and I wanted to pay for StaffPad on the US Microsoft store with a UK card. In the end I decided to start a new account and try over again which eventually worked.

In my rush to install StaffPad, I realised that I wanted to change the default folder for storing StaffPad scores. Not being familiar with the Surface, I emailed StaffPad support and was amazed to get a response from Matthew Tesch, the lead developer himself by return, despite me being on Pacific time meaning that it was in the early hours in the UK...Top marks!!!

Now, onto StaffPad. Friends and acquaintances will know that I am a naturally reserved type of chap. When I first put pen to Surface and my first bar popped into perfectly engraved notation, I quite literally whooped with joy. I might even have punched the air.

There is a tiny bit of a lag in the pen movement (maybe there is a setting for this, I will explore later), so it takes a bit of practice to learn how StaffPad likes you to input for best recognition. As I'm getting used to it, it is becoming much easier to write in a way which the app understands. Recognition is improved if you zoom in for writing...The usual pinch gesture works nice and smoothly.

The various functions are really well thought out and intuitive...For example, to copy and paste, you double tap with your finger to select a bar and then tap on the end bar to select the bars to copy. You then click on the copy button which is on a toolbar which pops up when the first double click is performed. You then select where the pasted bars are to go to select and then click on the past button. Transposing is just as easy.

In the few days I've had StaffPad, I have created a nice stack of music, all in various stages, happy in the knowledge that I can go back to them and work on each one as I get an idea...Much better than working on a stack of papers or a notebook.

I've opened StaffPad scores in Sibelius and vice versa via MusicXML and this works very well...Especially (as suggested by StaffPad) you store your scores in your OneDrive folder so it syncs to your Sibelius computer (there is a Mac app too). I reckon that I'll be writing and printing for smaller instrumental sessions directly from StaffPad, but would want to polish the larger work in Sibelius and print from there. This is ideal for me as it was always the inputting the notes that I found arduous. StaffPad are promising various upgrades and improvements, so this may well change.

FYI, it will also play back the music for you...Something that I find troubling, as I have all along with Sibelius. I've said before that if you can't hear what you're writing in your head as you write it, you really shouldn't be bothering at all. However, I suppose that it's handy for checking that all those pesky notes and accidentals are in the right place and the export .mp3 function is useful for demoing ideas for clients before any expensive sessions.

The Surface is very comfortable to work with and the pop out stand presents it at a comfortable angle for writing landscape style. I prefer portrait myself, so I don't use the stand much but the screen bezel makes it easy to handle in portrait mode without pressing things you don't need. It can also sense when you're leaning your wrist on the screen which makes it just like writing on paper.

I have a few instrumental sessions coming up...One orchestral, so I'm busy writing these parts on Surface. The only part of the pencil/paper method I really miss is taking five minutes to sharpen up the pencil and make a cup of tea. I've got a feeling that I'll be missing more than just lunch from now on...I could do with losing a few pounds!!!

Restoration

I recently went through a box of old tapes and found some albums I'd written *cough* years ago. Two were DAT masters and the other was a cassette copy whose DAT master has long since gone missing. After listening through, I thought I'd try cleaning the music and remastering with Izotope RX4 and Ozone 6.

Most tracks were fine as they were as they were basically 'classical' orchestration, but there were a few dated sounds which I was able to either edit out or re-record the track. The DAT masters were nice and clean, as you'd expect, but even the cassette master cleaned up nicely with fingerprint processing on the RX4.

I'll go into one track in particular in detail. Georgia's Lake At Midnight consists of a synthesiser ostinato with a slight build which features flute and fretless bass solos over. Unfortunately, the solos didn't sound great to 2015 ears, so I decided to try to extract the ostinato (which has a very characteristic sound and movement)  and rebuild the track from scratch.

This was from the cassette master, so the first job was to remove the tape sound with the fingerprint method. There was plenty of tape noise to sample at the top of the cassette and RX4 cleaned the music nicely, while leaving the music intact. The next problem was that the track begins with sea surf and birdsong which continues and slowly fades as the ostinato plays at the beginning of the track. The solos begin just after the surf is faded out, so there is no clear instance of the ostinato.

So, I fingerprinted the surf sound and ran that...This made a vast improvement, but there were a few crests of surf, which showed on RX4 as amorphous blobs. Spectral repair rendered these barely noticeable. I used the same method to remove the birdsong, which show up as spidery wisps on RX4.

This left one last sound which took me a while to identify...I eventually realised that it was the sound of massed frogs!!! These were in a very narrow frequency band, so I was able to notch those out without damaging the music.

With a bit of EQ and reverb, the ostinato sounds better than new and is now assembled into a full track and ready for the solos. I'd like to keep the flute, but I think I will replace the fretless with Cor Anglais. So this particular track is waiting for an upcoming session before completion.

I have finished the two other albums and they are available on iTunes...Click on the links below...

The Age Of Steam

The Book Of Knowledge