A few months ago I celebrated my birthday. Nothing new. Happens every year. But as you get older, you begin to consciously realize that time is running out and if you’re going to write the musical equivalent of the Great American Novel, now would be an awfully good time to start.
I’m finding myself growing more [...]

Writing pitches isn’t the same as writing words. The approach is drastically different, especially when writing historical fiction. You’ll read pages upon pages of facts. You’ll log them down for future use. Then you start to write. You look at the facts. You consider the scene or situation  you’re writing about, and you back in [...]

It was with great pleasure and relief that I posted, today, the final lessons in my Marketing Your Music and You class. What started out to be a “simple” four-lecture class turned into a major extravaganza going for nine lessons and lots of unplanned hours of preparation and teaching.
What prompted me to expand so much?
The [...]

Today I started scoring the Bourree Fantasque excerpt for strings for the 50th Anniversary re-release of Professional Orchestration: A Practical Handbook by Joseph Wagner. Here’s a screen shot of it:

For the first six and a half bars, the melody falls into the range allowing for Vlns 1 + Vlns 2 + Violas + Cellos. This [...]

Reading the preliminary test results from other composers on the Kontakt 3.5 update beta that’s just been released suggests that the Mac Pro Nehalem is now the dominant music computer with the oft wished request of being able to do it all on one system, pretty much here.
The new 64-bit Kontakt 3.5, in standalone mode, [...]

EastWest Gypsy is worth your consideration because in one library you have one of the finest collections of guitars I’ve run across not to mention a superb solo violin that has thousands of uses beyond Gypsy music.