#at least musescore is good now

[natural-blogarithm]

i think i have to give up on the linux musician dream 😞 all the good orchestral libraries are for windows/mac only

[sollucets]

beloveds @khaotunq, @pranink & @alexshenry tagged me to do:

every month of 2023! list your favorite/most popular gifset for each month.

i started making gifs in march this year, so january/february are off the table for this. it's funny that it hasn't even been a full year yet. it seems both somehow a lot longer and also like i remain some kind of photoshop baby at the same time. the images in this post will remain undescribed until i have some energy in my failing body, unfortunately

in any case:

march: midnight museum invades all 2 of my braincells. i download photoshop. the end is nigh

most popular: msp/eclipse pool parallel set

favorite: the bams i made for sof

(notes: it's hard to look back at these lmao. what is coloring and why don't i know her. why is everything so dark. who told me to use noise dithering and why did i ever think that was a good idea. anyway)

april: the eighth sense is airing! i meet many mutuals and friends. i figure out about the curves tool (thank god)

most popular: taehyung getting dunked on

(very deserved dunk; very bad set. the coloring of this scene was extremely questionable and i did nothing to fix it it looks so dull and gray. augh)

favorite: feet lining up / jihyun & jaewon on the beach

i really like this coloring actually. it's bright enough to actually see them, their skin doesn't look as weird, and i like the soft pink i made the beach. a win for baby photoshop user rowan

may: the purple is in full swing now

most popular: purple yok

first set to cross 1k! the purple is still very good but in hindsight there are things i now know i couldve done to help his skin. in any case. a banger. beloved

favorite: pink our skyy 2 hands set

[through tears] you're my space. also my first try at typography

june: i lose the will to gif some in the back half of this month, but i also learn to do a Lot of new things, like gradient maps & more complicated typography and transitions and such

most popular: puzzle piece hugs!

deserved! hard to gif and fun to look at

favorite: i think it might be the heartliming i made for vi now! but i still like khathadome from eden too.

july: i try giffing a few different shows. the only friends trailer comes out on the last day and i enter some kind of terrifying fugue state

most popular: sand and ray fighting / crying in the ofts trailer

do you guys remember the trailer 1080p? life was so good

favorite: nobody appreciates my ride enough

august: only friends airs, eclipse anniversary is concurrent, i lose my mind. i also learn to use the method of brightening that i still use & several other fundamental gif tricks

most popular: sandray car makeout

good for them! i start using significant grain on my ofts gifs from here on out and can never decide how i feel about that

favorite: orange/blue eclipse episode seven set

september: the madness continues

most popular: sand cooking for ray / special

ive giffed this scene three times and this is my least favorite coloring but what can you do. this is my third post to cross 1k

favorite: new rules set! i had mixed feelings when i posted it but it's really grown on me.

october: the madness is so much worse. only friends ends and i am left near-catatonic immediately, apparently. also, i learn to blend and use overlays and some other cool things. i join userdramas :'>

most popular: raysand afterglow. as it should be. cheek kissie

favorite: space girl!! show me the stars!!!

loved making this. purple and sparkly and gay. still super proud. that said other runner-up favorites in october are ray's o-face & the boyfriend shirt & akkaye's thumb thing collection

november: i am left cavernously empty after ofts ends and i fill the void with namtan

most popular: last twilight episode one porjai

she <3

favorite: gaipa userdramas set

again, i learned to use musescore for this set just so i could have those pretty notes. :')

december: i am punched in the face by seasonal depression. all is not well. i made just one gifset this month, but at least it was good? :')

and here we are today !! it was very fun to look over everything; thanks so much for playing and have a happy new year everyone

[blindrapture]

I guess it's time for another little update.

so one thing I've been doing lately is I watched Revolutionary Girl Utena. I don't think I should have binged it all in three days, as the anime itself is quite repetitive, but the ideas within are delicious, and it ends (with the Movie) on an incredibly high note. honestly one of the best endings I've ever seen to a serious drama.

another thing I'm doing is rereading the Moomin books. it's been over a decade. it is about time. I need that energy in my life. I'm currently on the "second" book, Finn Family Moomintroll (though I started with The Great Flood). these are very easy books to read, and they really do surprise me with how they approach themes over the course of a several-book series. there's an elegance to the storytelling, a competence that is hard to quantify.

ellie is still gradually showing me Bojack Horseman. we're currently halfway through season 4, which is my favorite season so far. it's becoming the exact kind of show I'd wanted it to be: obsessed with psychology and giving its explorations time to breathe.

I recently watched Best F(r)iends, the three-hour 2019 movie by Greg Sestero, starring himself and Tommy Wiseau. was it good? uh. well. it came and went, I'll put it that way. but I got more into it as it went on, was surprised by how it used suspense. and the highlight was Tommy Wiseau, as goddammit I do in fact want to watch Tommy in serious dramatic roles. (when I finally watched The Room last year, I found I actually gave a shit about its plot. Lisa is a victim. and also the antagonist. like, my point here is that "bad filmmaking" is not an obstacle for me, it's a challenge. ellie also recently showed me Troll 2, and that was... well I preferred The Room, but Troll 2 had some actual potential in it.) anyway, Tommy was excellent in Best F(r)iends. the movie played to his acting strengths.

aside from that, it's mostly been music for me. a lot of the same music. I like music.

and creation.

symbolically, the smoke is pouring out of my chimney this week, as my forge is burning again. some things are being worked on.

I've got musescore projects underway, of course. new songs. albums still in the works.

my Website has seen the odd update. some updates are secret right now and will not be linked to.

I'm gathering and consolidating notes I've taken over the years, finding old notebooks and loose sheets of paper that pertain to some of my stories. going over them again, seeing what's still relevant, what I can work with.

and I dug out my drawing tablet the other day. spent like 9 hours drawing things yesterday (or, today, however you want to look at it).

a lot of what I focused on is secret for now, as it's Rapture stuff.

but I did also bring my attentions to Plan 31's art. I think I'd like to have a lot of it done in my own hand.

here's some of that.

that soundtrack art's starting to look freaky, isn't it? very happy with that. it's the one aspect of the whole story that's trying to allude to Future Events, implying the tone might not always be a fun comedy. McFear is a menace. we might not meet him for years at this rate.

we will see something this year, though.

and at the very least, you will see Rapture.

smoke coming out of my chimney, the household is at work again, Rapture is coming.

I'll keep you posted.

[thorne1435]

I wish that more people would get into composing music, because it's fun and therapeutic and neat, but like. It's really fucking expensive if you're looking into typical, professional equipment, so I understand why they don't.

Personally, I just don't think you need to start out on a DAW. It feels unnecessary, and it feels like it's an easy way to gatekeep art from the poor. "Professional" Music software ropes people into spending, like, $500+ on the software alone, and then expects them to be able to play an instrument, which involves owning an instrument which varies wildly in price depending on what the instrument is and if it's well-made.

(there's also the occasional software that's aimed at people who are able to record themselves playing that instrument and like...the logistics of that costs a lot, but it's not strictly required or anything. there's also an argument to be had here about the culture surrounding machine-produced sounds as opposed to human-performed sounds, and I'm just not gonna get into it right now)

That's why I don't fucking use a DAW. I'm poor!

I got started on Flat.io, which is not a DAW, but it is free! It's kind of like Noteflight or Musescore if you're at all familiar with either of those things, but the general consensus is that Musescore is better than Flat is better than Noteflight. I've never used Musescore. But I know that Flat is better than Noteflight. It's just a website that has really good instrument variety. It's primarily limited by the fact that you can only use western musical notation. You're also limited to 15 scores without their subscription service (which I got a lifetime membership on for like 150 dollars? but i think they've increased the price since then? dont know, cant see it anymore) but honestly it's not so bad because they don't enforce the ban on multiple accounts as hard as they say they do.

So I guess what I'm saying is like...even if you don't know what you're doing and you're really nervous and you don't want to share anything and you think it costs way too much money (because it does), like...give it a shot. Go digging for artistic software, regardless of the medium, and eventually you will find what you want. And even though the free services can get penny-pinching at times, there's usually at least one out there that can show you whether or not you really want to get into it before you hit the paywall.

And also what I'm saying is go look at Flat.io. Because it's cool. And I've used it for years. And I really like it. And you should go look at it.

[lostinthewinterwood]

...so, my oldest file for this claims it was created in 2020, but I'm pretty sure I've been playing with these harmonies since at least 2018? Maybe earlier, even, I'm not certain. the harmonies were allllmost complete in 2020 but then it took me another five years to get around to figuring out what wasn't quite right with them. as you do.

Anyway, uh, I heard this (...i think in high school...) and went "you know what would be good here? harmonies!" and so here we are, a frankly embarrassing number of years later.

hopefully this isn't too weird to be posting now lmao

(also I agree that the melody is extremely familiar! alas I also failed to place it. it sounds kind of like a gospel song? I sang several in choir as a child but it's not any one of them that I can actually remember the melody for, so.... idk)

sheet music under the cut bc i do all of my composing in musescore so i might as well share the fruits of my labor lmao. several of the parts are not being sung in the same octave I originally wrote them down in bc i am a baritone! and the first four-part arrangement i did was satb. so. this music is what i was singing tho

ETA: lol tumblr keeps eating my audio except on my blog page. this is a functional webbed site. gdrive copy below

(sorry if you're in dark mode, i couldn't be bothered to fix the images of the music being transparent pngs and i don't think? i can put a pdf on tumblr? lmao)

Heavily based on @fialleril​‘s Amavikkan worldbuilding. This is almost certainly too openly revolutionary to actually sing at any point in the stories, but…

Lyrics below the cut.

Keep reading

[crembrulem]

Freedom

aka Chiffy, dans les versions précédentes

2019 ou 2020

Find another,

Another way to get my woogie wagon rollin'; lay tracks to keep me going

Another,

Another way to get by

I failed

And my psyche's way too fragile to accept it, I quit and start again with

Another,

Another way to move

*Ooh, how I long for freedom

I want to get my honey when I want when I need some

Don't want to spend my dollars in a blink of eye, so

I search the night, I search but I can't find, I...

Ooh, how good it feels

Dissociate from now, chase and search for my ideals, and

I'm spending over what I'm monthly allowed, I'm

Breaking my own rules: that's how I roll from now

Oh

Time for dinner

I'm gonna serve some fancy caviar for dessert

Then, the main course, then, exert

To the covers

At least I'm dying alive

Side effect

And my head I keep it scratching 'til it's bleeding

I try but still believe in this

Other

This other way to move

musescore:

soundcloud:

Je crois que c'est assez clair.

[necarion]

When I’m writing music, I have two major struggles: “don’t overcompose”, and “stop tinkering; it’s done”.

On that note, I’m currently trying to finish up a piece that is my sparsest in terms of piano texture. Which means that the tinkering instinct is really strong. Fortunately, for the moment, the things I’m trying to tinker with are, structurally, things I should be thinking about in editing passes. I have some motifs that I want to bring out a little more* and some things I want to ensparsen in the piano.  But those lead to other things needing to be tweaked.

At least formatting (plus raw notation-use) is one of those things where the tweaking is necessary and straightforward.**

But I need to be done now. Time to spend another forever getting the MIDI to sound decent in Reaper, so I can then record myself singing it.  Would be way easier if I could play it on piano.

* e.g., the song is in 6/8, but I have phrase-ending hemiolas in 3/4.  I actually needed to make a few more of them to make them feel like not-mistakes.  But that involves touching up

** I’m using NoteworthyComposer. It is uniquely good at setting lyrics (and essential for some of the Old English stuff I do). And just terrible at almost everything else, especially formatting. On the other hand, it’s incredibly stable and has never crashed on me (when the entire computer crashes, it saves a backup file and lets me know).  Whereas MuseScore has eaten an hour of work without maintaining a backup, and Finale just takes forever to do anything useful.

[nova-corpus-genesis]

I don’t know what I like.

There comes a point in your life where you have a great point of self-discovery, be it forced or not. I’m at the point where I’m ready to have my self-discovery, but it’s really hard to because of how I have distorted my own identity. So I am in the forced camp.

It takes a lot of mental work to rework your brain to trust you again. It takes a lot of self-talk and mindfulness to truly discern what you want to be and what you think you want to be. Me, being an extremely vain and superficial person, I pursued things that I thought I wanted to be to seem successful and competent. I never really did things just because I liked them. Everything seemed like work. So I never really did anything I liked besides videogames because they easily held and kept my attention. That’s the only thing I know I enjoy nowadays, videogames. I turned every other interest I had into a job, something that required effort, and not things I did to have fun and enjoy myself. Since I was really good at avoiding work and things that required effort, all I did was play videogames. But every person is multifaceted and I know there are other things out there for me to enjoy.

I want to respark my love for making music and visual art again. I have so many projects planned that I want to get started, but it’s so hard to start them (I’ll save this concept for another post). Now with this new power of being able to do what I want, I am finally able to start these things. It still takes effort to start, but it just seems so much more realistic.

It’s just a start, but I’m starting to mill out all the things that I don’t enjoy that I forced myself to enjoy. Things like writing a novel or poetry. I HATE POETRY. People just think it’s impressive or makes you a more well rounded person if you do more things. At least that’s what I thought. People generally don’t give a shit.

That’s an incredibly powerful epiphany to come to. Most people don’t care what you do in your life, and society doesn’t care if you do or don’t write books. It’s all a self-centered illusion. The most important thing is that you enjoy what you do because the most important person in your life is you. Period. If you aren’t happy where you are in life, it doesn’t matter what other people think, do what makes you happy. 

If you are having identity issues like me, maybe try this technique I figured out for myself. Once a month, at the beginning of the month, fill out this form:

Name: (Your Name)

Gender: (Your Gender) (Your Pronouns)

General Mood: (Overall mood felt in the last month)

Interests:  (List of your interests and why you like them)

Dislikes:  (List of your dislikes and why you dislike them) Things I Like About Myself: (Qualities and behaviors that you have that you like and why. If nothing, also explain why) 

Things I Don’t Like About Myself: (Qualities and behaviors that you have that you dislike and why.)

Things I Want to Change: (Qualities and behaviors that you have that you would like to change and why.)

How I Am Going to Change: (Realistic and sustainable changes to your life that help you change those behaviors. [Remember to keep these realistic and sustainable; start as small as you need to. Many small changes can lead to major improvements!].)

Here’s an example:

Name: Ethan

Gender: Male (He/Him)

General Mood: Hopeful (I have faith in myself that I will be able to create a better life for myself this year)

Interests: Visual Arts (I enjoy seeing the ideas I have in my head become real on paper. It is also therapeutic), Listening to Music (Very cathartic, brain massage, head feel good), Producing Music (I like making pretty melodies in Musescore 3 and, to a lesser degree, making EDM in FL Studio), Video Games (I enjoy playing games with others and experiencing stories within a game world. Also I am addicted to Osu, help), Cooking and Baking (I enjoy making food for others and learning about how food works). Learning foreign languages (I find learning how certain grammar structures work in different languages. Also, learning new languages feels like finding a key to unlock a whole new part of the world that was blocked behind a language barrier). Game Development (Kinda like Visual arts but with music and writing into the mix. Super satisfying to see all these types of art come together to create a single piece of art. Also story writing can be fun.)

Dislikes:  Writing Poetry (I find it really hard and boring to make poetry I enjoy.), Sports (Never really got the hype around watching sports, but playing sports can be fun sometimes, not all the time though), Childishness in Adults ( I cannot stand a grown person acting so childish. It is one of my worst pet peeves), Feeling Helpless (Nothing is worse than feeling things are out of your control), Cluttered Household (I also cannot stand having a dirty household, ESPECIALLY the kitchen) Things I Like About Myself: I am Kind to My Friends and Family (I am glad that I can be nice to others naturally, and I don’t need to try too hard to be kind to others), My Mindfulness (I think that I have really good mindfulness techniques built up over the years and I can use them to help me get through tough mental situations), My Cooking (I believe my cooking tastes good and people are happy when I cook or bake for them.)

Things I Don’t Like About Myself: Lack of Focus (I seem to get side tracked extremely easily which interferes with what I want to get done [Fun fact: I stopped in the middle of doing the dishes to write this post]), Spending Too Much Time on Meaningless Things (I watch way too much YouTube which doesn’t even educate or even make me laugh half of the time, it’s just a time sink), My Weight (I don’t like how my body weight effects my health and the way it makes me look), Horrible Sleeping Patterns (I can barely have consistent sleep and it makes my life more chaotic and I feel tired all the time).

Things I Want to Change: Sleep Hygiene (I want to employ better sleep Hygiene so I can have better mental and physical health.) My Weight (I want to loose weight so I can have better heath and feel better about my body.) Lack of Exercise (I want to exercise more regularly since it has shown to better my mental health and physical health.)

How I Am Going to Change: Sleep Hygiene (Employ a “no screen time 1 hour before bed��� policy so I can more readily fall asleep, also make sure my bed is made before I get in it to sleep.) My Weight (I will work to make sure I eat what is best for my body to be healthy and make sure not to do any crash diets that may cause me to gain weight due to binging after restricting. Sustainability is key.) Lack of Exercise (Research different types of exercise so I can find one I enjoy and is sustainable for my lifestyle and needs.)

This is a nice experiment to see how you change from month to month and it’s a helpful tool to check in with yourself on a regular basis. You can watch how your self-talk changes as well and see if it trends negative or positive throughout the year. It’s also cool to see what stays consistent. Your interests and dislikes will change as you grow and go about life. That’s just how humans work. The interesting thing is that you can truly see what your core interests are and how you see yourself by what stays consistent from month to month.

Also, this is not a to-do list for the month, this is a self check tool to help you know what you are as a person and what your goals and aspirations are to better yourself. Whatever you put in this form does not have to be completed within the month, it’s just there to let you know what you wanted for yourself at the beginning of that certain month. The things you want to change in your life will probably change just as much as your interests. The things that stay consistent are the things you value the most and the things that aren’t there anymore show the progress that you have made as a person.

This was just an idea I had that I thought I’d share. It helps me, but it might not before everyone. If you’re in a hard spot, it’s best to see professionals because I am not a doctor. 

Thanks so much for reading and see you all in the New Year!

Ethan

[musicforfour]

Brielle, arranged for SATB Song by Adam Young (Sky Sailing)

When I uploaded my first arrangement on MuseScore, I was flattered that it got any views at all. I never thought that there would be any possibility of other people discovering my song arrangements ‘cause I always thought that the songs I listen to are out of the mainstream. I mean, I mostly listen to songs from musicals and I don’t really listen to the pop songs of today. If anything, I listen to pop songs from artists/bands that I found, if I look for them in the first place rather than just go with whoever is hot today.

So whenever I check out the statistics page for my scores on MuseScore, it’s rather nice to see my songs arrangements get some views day by day, and it’s a pleasant surprise whenever someone puts my arrangement in the favorites list. I can see why some arrangements are put in people’s favorites because the songs are ‘popular�� like Shots from the band Imagine Dragons or the epic Internet joke Shia LaBeouf. 

But I’m rather bewildered when songs like If Mountains Were Easy to Climb and This Isn’t the End managed to get as many views as the ‘popular’ songs. The former is from a musical that only played in the West End and never on Broadway, and the latter is not the iconic song from Owl City, so I never thought people would actually be looking for scores for those songs on MuseScore. Furthermore, I don’t think I did the greatest arrangements for those two songs, so that adds to my curiosity.

Nonetheless, someone commented for my arrangement of This Isn’t the End, and I thanked her in reply, to which she responded with a request for a score for the song Brielle by Sky Sailing (who is actually the same Adam Young of Owl City). I had been working on another song at that point, but I was just so thrilled to have my first ever request that I put the other song on the shelf and started arranging Brielle.

However, I also replied to her that it would take quite a while to finish. I actually had gotten an offer for a job and I was waiting for my first day when I got this request, so I knew I wouldn’t have as much time to arrange and finish it as quickly as I could when I started working for my job. Sure enough, I didn’t have any time to arrange afterward. In fact, I barely had the time and energy to do anything outside of work. 

I didn’t anticipate how much strength I needed to put in for my job. It didn’t help that my hands weren’t good at handling with tools, and all that I had studied in university were never used and I had to learn everything from scratch. It’s a long story, but suffice to say that I struggled there. I felt stuck and hopeless with being incompetent, so much so that I decided to leave before I made anymore mess and damage there, much to my father’s distress and disappointment.

So yeah, glasses of beer, a scar, angry shoutings, tears and breakdowns later, I got back to where I started. Not a better place to be, but at least I’m more relaxed and I don’t feel as tired and down as I had been before. It was around this time when I finally got around to finish what I started with Brielle. I finished the arrangement, uploaded it on MuseScore, and messaged the one who requested about the finished score. I haven’t heard anything from her, but I did receive a comment from another fan of the song, so I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

Now, about the song, it begins with the picking of the guitar strings and some piano playing to end the phrases. I decided to use the lower three voices to capture this sound which ultimately left me with no choice but to give the Sopranos the melody line while the Basses, Tenors and Altos became the accompaniment, each with their own rhythms and lines. Even some lines for the Sopranos are actually a part from the piano accompaniment because the other three parts are already so busy with their own rhythms from the guitar accompaniment and I don’t want them to change the notes too fast from one phrase to the next without stopping.

As the song progresses, there are beats from the drums and chords from the guitar strumming that drive the song later on. I feel the drum beats in the song are rather strong and got in the way of the song’s bittersweet feels while the song had its moment whenever it comes to a quieter part, so I hope that having a more intimate setting with only voices helps in bringing out the feels more from the song. 

The arrangement begins with the three accompanying parts having different rhythms to drive the song, so similarly in the chorus, I gave the three accompanying parts different rhythms, forming a chord only every now and then to continue driving the song. Once the guitar picking pattern from the beginning was broken, I could finally give the melody line to the Tenors for the second verse. 

But for the second chorus, I gave the melody line back to the Sopranos with a harmony part for the Altos. Perhaps because of an image of a ship sailing on the sea from the music video, somehow I got the notion of having the melody line riding over the busy currents underneath. So for the second chorus, I have the Sopranos sing the melody with the Altos harmonizing along, while the Basses give a steady beat and the Tenors sing the wavy lines going up and down and become the busy currents. 

There is always a harmony to the melody in the chorus even in the first one, but I wanted to establish how I wanted to drive the song with the three accompanying part in the first chorus, so I kept the harmony line for the second chorus for the Altos, leaving the Tenors all alone to drive the song and make all the waves and currents to drive the song during the second chorus. I didn’t really think of having wavy lines for the Basses. I’m not sure if it’s because I needed them to be a stable foundation for the other three parts, or because I didn’t think they could pull off singing up and down the scale faster than in crochets. (I’m sorry Basses, I hope I can write better parts for y’all in other songs.)

MV: https://youtu.be/_PkzsMak6P8 Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/5431848

[windybit]

So um

Music Mondays now? I guess? Maybe like the first Monday of the month or something.

I do my arrangements on MuseScore (it’s free and it serves my purposes well enough), so the instrumentation sounds pretty midi-ish. At least until recently with the Muse Sounds update, but I have my complaints with that too. I still think it sounds good :)

Anyways, this is Onward to Our Own Futures from the credits of Pokemon Black & White, arranged by me c. 2020

[musescore-com]

MuseScorer of the month: Takernikov

And here comes August’s MuseScorer of the Month!

In case you missed it, each month we pick one of MuseScore.com’s brilliant members, featuring him or her in an interview available to all MuseScorers. Last month we introduced you to flutist and composer Robin M. Butler.

Now, please welcome: the MuseScorer Of August, Takeru aka Takernikov from Fukuoka, Japan.

“I love the words of my professor at the university. He said, that good music has ‘consistency’ and ‘variety’; If no consistency, it would be confusing. If no variety, it’d be boring.”

The following interview is featuring Takeru and is conducted by our staff member Alexander T.

- Hi, Takeru.It’s a pleasure to meet you! Tell our readers, please, a few words about yourself.

Hello, Alexander, nice to meet you too. Well, I’m from Fukuoka, northern side of Kyushu island, Japan, and live in this city with my wife and a little son (three years old right now). I studied acoustic design at the university, i.e. solving room acoustic issues with physics. Actually I wanted to study at conservatory but my musical skills were not good enough to pass the examination. Luckily, I had an opportunity to take composing classes at the university. So, I learnt music theory, notation, how to compose, and musical forms like sonata.Now, I’ve been an IT engineer specialized in networks for a decade, I like this job. My experience as a musician includes playing: - tuba, double bass and clarinet at high-school; - bassoon and contrabassoon at university; - piano - since I turned 15 years old.

- Cool, such a variety of instruments ! Did you come a long way to learn playing them?

Actually I was kinda tone deaf when in junior high school. There were lotta choral classes sadly, the music teacher pointed out my tone deafness every time, some students teased me. But, finally, I overcame that so-called “tone deafness”; I got interested in music, I began to play piano, which had been bought by my mother when she got married. Then, I played in a brass band in high school. As far as I remember, at some point I came across a really attracting piece called “El Camino Real”. First time I saw the score, I was confused about the key signature for transposing instruments, but I found my own way to read it. The skill I got at that time has helped me a lot later, when studying from the other composer’s work. I was also playing contrabass for a year, clarinet for two months and tuba for about two years. When I entered university, as I have already said, I began to play bassoon and contrabassoon in the “Orchestra club”. I’ve played symphonies (Brahms No.1, 4, Beethoven No.5, 7, 9, Tchaikovsky No.5, 6, Rachmaninoff No.1, 2, Dvorak No.5, 7, 8, 9, Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, and so on), overtures and suites. I tried to perform in a rock band as a keyboard player, but sadly it wasn’t good…

- But, anyway, trying something different is always (or almost always) a nice experience...Well, let’s talk about your composing experience: what is that about for you, and what or who helped you to start composing?

Apart from the composing classes at the university, I took part in picking musical pieces for upcoming concerts as a member of the council of the university orchestra (I was a leading bassoon player). We listened to all of the ‘candidate’ scores to decide whether they are playable for our orchestra, worthwhile or not. So,I read a lot of scores from Bach to Shostakovich. Especially I’ve been curious about the orchestration, I tried to understand, how do composers notate their music to make it sound really nice and beautiful.

At first, I tried to compose something with Finale when in the university, about eleven years ago, but quitted composing after I graduated. As I dislike using a mouse, I felt it was inefficient to notate with drag and drop, so I lost some motivation. Then, when I was searching for sheet music from Final Fantasy XV soundtrack for piano, I came across this amazing MuseScore notation program. I remember, that I was greatly impressed by the features MuseScore had (and still has, of course). It has intuitive UI for me, mostly I can notate with keyboard quickly as if writing a document. Till that day I hadn’t composed a piece for about ten years. But now almost everything motivates me to compose, but especially natural landscapes or some exercises (sports) I did or things happened to me...

- ...and now, as I can see, you’ve got a plenty of your own pieces on MuseScore.com Can you describe at least some of them?

All-right. Let’s start with Snow Run - one Sunday morning I did a trail run with friends through an urban forest park and some ranch, the duration of the 3D map movie generated by my GPS log data on the run was 52 seconds, so I decided to compose this piece in 2/4, 52 measures with 120 bpm to make it easy to count. Composed this piece within an hour or so - I realized I could compose quicker than imagined...

- Sorry for interrupting, but I wonder - do you often compose these “GPS-log” pieces after your morning runs, and is that the only reason why most of your compositions are short?

Basically there are two reasons for that: 1: you are right about the “GPS compositions”: after I do some endurance exercise like cycling or running, there’s some service which can create some short movies by my GPS logs. Usually the duration of the movies are short, less than 1-2 minutes; I compose for this ‘movies’ on the same day and share with my friends. 2: I said “compose on the same day”. I set a deadline for myself and try to accomplish that on time. Kind of repetitive practices, it’s a good way to express my feelings and to ‘improve productivity’ in my opinion. I feel, this affects even my job activity in a good way as well.

- So, let’s continue with your compositions…

Ok, then I’ll tell you about a couple more. La Chute D'eau élargi - inspired by French impressionists, deliberately titled in French, however, it includes some pentatonic scales, so for me it sounds like some Japanese folk music. Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa - an attempt to create minimal music from my original phrases I came up with, after I was reading a picture book for my son. That sounds a little weird, but I ended up with clear and refreshing atmosphere in this piece.

- Nice pieces, the second one reminded me of Steve Reich. And now, here is our “traditional” question: what have you shared on MuseScore.com that you’re most proud of (and why are you proud of it) ?

It’s Symphonic Poem “Mamacoco”. This is the most emotional and dramatic one I have ever composed. Although I’m generally a short piece composer, the duration of this one is about 14min. and it contains almost everything I could do as a composer. Attempted to fill it with beautiful melodies and counterpoints in the tonal slow part, and to make it exciting in the quasi-atonal fast part, naturally “covered” the previous slow melodies with different instruments (brass). I was surprised what I did actually, huge resolution followed by very tensed atmosphere before the recapitulation. The last part starts with almost sad flute’s phrase, it gradually changes to a kind of brilliant sounding.

Symphonic Poem “Mamacoco” by Takernikov

- I love the melodies in it, for me “Mamacoco” sounds like ‘pastoral’ music. I wonder what composers/performers influenced you. And, generally, what are your favorites?

I love Russian composers Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and that’s why my MuseScore account name is “Takernikov”, like a Russian surname. I don’t mean that I’m limited by the Romantic era, I also respect Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Debussy, Ravel, Liszt, even Steve Reich. In film composing, Hans Zimmer is the first composer that comes to my mind. Generally, most of the film composers affected me: James Horner, Steve Jablonsky, Joe Hisaishi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, etc..Honestly saying, the composer I can’t even imitate is Don Davis. His music, especially the orchestration and atonality in it, is outstanding in my opinion.

Would like to admit, that Takernikov is the first composer I met, whose beautiful music is often inspired by morning runs and whose pieces’ length really depend on the time he devoted to his physical exercises. That’s an interesting fact and Takeru is a really nice composer, it was a pleasure for me to do this interview and to meet him.

Thank you, guys, for reading.

Yours, Alexander T.

P.S. Following the nice tradition - I am adding here a piece I really enjoyed , this is a kind of “spanish sketch” composed by Mr.Takernikov.

Él irá a España by Takernikov

[clearpeanutcollector]

The Best Backup Software For Mac 2018

The Best Backup Software For Mac 2018 Torrent

Best Backup For Mac Computer

Mar 30, 2020  Best free backup software 2020: save your files and folders and work for free By Mark Wycislik-Wilson, Cat Ellis, Brian Turner 30 March 2020 Protect and save your important work. Your Mac probably contains hundreds of important documents and thousands of sentimental photos. If you don’t have a backup, a single careless moment could lose them all forever. A spill from a cup of coffee, a fall onto a concrete floor, or an opportunistic thief are all enough for your data to be gone for. Download and install the best free apps for Backup Software on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android from CNET Download.com, your trusted source for the top software picks.

Last updated on October 5th, 2018 at 10:24 am. Looking for best backup software for Mac? Well, there are different backup software and everyone claims that they are the best. But the reality is different. There are different features offered by some of the top backup software such as backup all the data including pictures, video clips. Jan 02, 2020 True Image is one of the very best for good reason. It's capable and flexible, and rock-solid reliable. Acronis claims over 100 enhancements to True Image 2020, which starts at $50 for the. For most of us mac data backup solution is just time Machine! But, that’s not enough. There are many backup solutions that are much more efficient than Time Machine. Cloud storage, bootable clone and many more. Here are few of the best Backup solutions for Mac in 2018.

Your Mac would certainly have important documents, files, favourite videos and other data. Having a copy of them updated on another location will help you in cases of data disaster like Mac crash, formatting, OS re-installation etc. For most of us mac data backup solution is just time Machine! But, that’s not enough. There are many backup solutions that are much more efficient than Time Machine. Cloud storage, bootable clone and many more. Here are few of the best Backup solutions for Mac in 2018.

Time Machine

As we all know, this is one of the best backup solution for Mac. It is built into Mac and is an offline backup. You just have to turn on Time Machine and connect external hard drive. Once you set it up, and forget it, Time Machine will keep updating the backup automatically as per the scheduled data & time. So, your backup will be updated, you can easily recover data in cases of data loss.

However, it’s just an offline backup and hence doesn’t offer complete data security.

iCloud

iCloud is the cloud storage backup solution offered to Mac users by Apple itself. It lets you store all your data – documents, photos, videos, excel sheets and other important data. Apple offers 5GB of free storage of iCloud. If required, you can upgrade the iCloud storage. To set up iCloud storage, you need to sign-in with your Apple account with Apple ID and password. You can select the plan required and set-up backup.

Drop box

Drop box is a great place where, you can store your important data securely. It offers a quick backup option that your files will be updated as soon as you create them or save the edits – data will be backed up right away. It offers – 2GB of storage space for free and the later will be charged as per the plan. However, just for $9.99 month you cab avail storage space of terabytes.

ScanScore is the newest Music Scanning software available, and offers excellent value for money. https://clearpeanutcollector.tumblr.com/post/640770089245917184/free-sheet-music-software-mac. The app is superb if you want to quickly playback or transpose your sheet music.Depending on how many staves you need to scan at once, you can choose between at different price points. Plus they have incorporate the use of your tablet or phone from the ground up. ScanScore 2 can export scores as a MusicXML file or MIDI file. However, beware that this software is currently WINDOWS only – so although you can use your iPad or iPhone to install the app and photograph your scores, to fully benefit from the software you need a PC.For more functionality, use ScanScore it in combination with Finale, Sibelius, MuseScore or other notation software.

Google One

This is a cloud platform enabled solution and is more secure form of backing up your important data. It is the rebranded version of Google Drive. Though it’s quite similar to Drop Box and is a great choice for backing up important data on Mac it lacks some backup features. Mac entity relationship diagram software.

However, on the pricing front, it suits everyone’s pocket. The subscription plans offered are 15GB free, $1.99/month for 100GB, $2.99/month for 200GB, more options. This can be a better option compared to Drop box in terms of pricing

These are some of the options available. You will get many such options. Research more on the goods and bad’s and then decide. Time Machine you don’t have an option to reject. However its good option, even though you lose data, you still have chances of recovering data after time machine failure on Mac computers like MacBook pro, iMac or others. Nevertheless, Online / cloud backups adds in more security. Just try the free storage spaces offered and then plan for subscriptions.

Your Mac probably contains hundreds of important documents and thousands of sentimental photos. If you don’t have a backup, a single careless moment could lose them all forever. A spill from a cup of coffee, a fall onto a concrete floor, or an opportunistic thief are all enough for your data to be gone for good. Trust me, you want to back up everything.

In this article I’ll discuss the different types of Mac backup software available, explain the features necessary for the best backup software solutions for Macs, and list eight of the best Mac backup software choices.

Different Types of Backup Software for Macs

The Best Backup Software For Mac 2018 Torrent

When it comes to backing up your Mac, there are several different kinds of backups:

Cloud Storage like Dropbox or Google Drive is a great first line of defence. With their basic versioning systems, they also stop you accidentally deleting a file and make sure you can’t lose your only copy in a single mishap.

A local backup—like Time Machine—is perfect for quickly restoring large files and giving you a bit of added security. However, a local backup is still vulnerable to things like fire, flooding, and theft. If your house burns down with your Mac inside, your backup drive isn’t likely to survive either.

A bootable clone is like a local backup but, instead of just storing a copy of your files, it stores a copy of your whole operating system. This means that if the hard drive in your computer fails, you can boot directly from your backup hard drive.

A cloud back up service like Backblaze stores all your files offsite. This means they’re safe from the kind of things that can take out a local backup. The problem is that restoring a large number of files from an online offsite backup is very time consuming. It can also take a bit of time before your files upload which means that if you accidentally delete a file you recently created, it might not be available. Cloud backups are a brilliant, bulletproof option, but they aren’t great as your only option.

There’s a saying when it comes to digital backups (and emergency supplies): one is none and two is one. The different backup options aren’t competing, instead you should build a system that uses a few different ones. To give you an idea of what this looks like, let’s take my current backup setup.

Every important file and everything I’m currently working on—like this article—is saved in Dropbox. Instead of using a Documents folder, I’ve got everything automatically moved into an Inbox in Dropbox. The only exception to this is large numbers of photos. This means that whatever happens to my Mac, the stuff I’m working on at the moment is safe. I could spill my coffee all over it, but at least this article would be safe.

About once a week, I connect an external hard drive to my Mac for an hour or two. Time Machine automatically backs everything up to the drive. This just means I’ve got a local copy of every file whatever happens.

I also have Backblaze running in the background. It’s constantly backing up my files to Backblaze’s servers. If the worst comes to the worst and every piece of tech I own is destroyed, at least my files are safe. I hope I never have to use it, but it’s very comforting to know it’s there.

At the moment, I don’t use a clone backup, however, when I was regularly using my Hackintosh, I had one. It was great to be able to roll back my Hackintosh to a stable system at any time. I always took a new clone before I updated anything or made major changes to how it ran.

What We’re Looking For in a Mac Backup Software Solution

A good backup app needs to do one thing really well: back up your files. You can’t be left thinking something is backed up when it really isn’t. We’re going to look at some great back up apps in each of the four categories above: local backups, clone backups, cloud backups, and cloud storage.

Each app we’ll look at is one of the best in its class. Most of them are apps that people on the Tuts+ team rely on to protect our own data. I’ve personally relied on five of them at various different stages and confidently recommend them all.

Since we’re really looking at four different kinds of apps, there’s no one feature set we want. We aren’t going to ding Time Machine for not backing up to an offsite server. Instead, for inclusion, each app had to have what we felt were the most important features for that kind of backup app. For example, a local backup should really have some kind of versioning, a clone needs to be easily bootable, and so on.

Best Backup Software for Macs

Now that we’ve discussed what to look for in Mac backup software, let’s look at the apps. Here are my picks for the best Mac backup software for 2018:

1. Time Machine

Time Machine is built into macOS and it should be your first go to as Mac backup software. Since it’s entirely free and dead simple to use (plug in hard drive, wait), there’s really no excuse for not having a Time Machine backup in addition to whatever other backup plan you have.

Time Machine isn’t perfect—no local backup is—so we would recommend you use at least one other solution as well.

2. Backblaze

Backblaze is my favorite cloud backup solution. For $5/month for each computer you want to back up, you can keep all your files totally safe. All your important data gets uploaded to Backblaze’s secure servers.

If you’re concerned about Backblaze slowing down your network, you can set an upload limit, schedule backups for when you’re asleep, or just let auto throttling do its thing.

If the worst comes to the worst and you need to restore some files, you can easily download them from Backblaze’s website. They also keep versions of each file for 30 days if you ever need to recover an early version. If you’re trying to restore an entire computer worth of data, you can order a 128GB USB key or 4TB hard drive with your data on it instead of waiting for it all to download.

3. Carbonite

Carbonite offers much the same service as Backblaze. For an annual fee, an unlimited amount of data on a single computer is backed up to their servers. At any time, you can log in and restore single files or everything.

Carbonite, however, comes with a couple of caveats. For example, video files are only backed up automatically if you’re prepared to sign up for the $111.99/year Plus plan. Similarly, if you want your data couriered to you, you’ll need to be on the $149.99/year Prime plan; Backblaze, on the other hand, charges a fee only if you choose to use a physical delivery, rather than having it built into the plan.

4. SuperDuper!

SuperDuper! is one of the best disk cloning apps for Mac. While there’s a paid version available for $27.95, the free version has all the features most people need.

You can use SuperDuper! as a regular backup app that copies files and folders to another hard drive, but it’s real strength is creating bootable clones. As discussed above, they make it a lot easier to get up and running again if your Mac’s hard drive fails.

The paid version of SuperDuper! adds a few useful features. One neat one is Smart Update which can update your existing clone backups; this means that SuperDuper! doesn’t have to create a totally new backup each time. You can also schedule backups to run.

5. Carbon Copy Cloner

Carbon Copy Cloner, like SuperDuper!, can create bootable backups and regular backups. The big difference is that the interface is a bit nicer and it’s easier for you to fully customise what files get backed up. If you want a separate back up of a few important files and folders in addition to a bootable clone, Carbon Copy Cloner is the way to go.

The downside is that there’s only a 30-day free trial. Carbon Copy Cloner is definitely worth the nearly forty dollars, but only if you’re going to use the extra features. If not, stick with SuperDuper!

6. Dropbox

Dropbox isn’t traditional backup software for a Mac and shouldn’t be treated as such. However, it’s a great place to keep the files you’re working on as soon as you create them.

With the exception of a cloud backup service, it’s unlikely your files will get backed up right away. This means that there is a window between whenever you start to work on something and when you back it up where something could happen. If, however, you save that file straight to your Dropbox folder, then you know it’s secure until a more permanent backup solution also has it stored.

You get 2GB of space on Dropbox for free which really isn’t very much at all. For $9.99 a month, however, you get a terabyte which is more than enough for most people’s needs.

7. Google One

Google One—Google’s recently rebranded Drive—is essentially the exact same service as Dropbox. It’s not the best traditional backup (although it does now offer some backup features) but it’s a great service for keeping your files accessible and a lot more secure than if they’re just sitting on your computer.

The big difference with Google One is the pricing and storage tiers. You get 15GB free, 100GB for $1.99/month, 200GB for $2.99/month, 2TB for $9.99/month, and it goes up from there. If you’re comfortable getting deep into Google’s ecosystem, it’s a better priced option than Dropbox.

8. Acronis True Image 2018

Acronis True Image is pretty much, an all in one backup solution. You can back files up to local hard drives, network attached storage devices, and Acronis’ own cloud backup service.

For $49.99 you get the app, however, to back up to the cloud, you’ll need to either subscribe to the Advanced plan for $49.99/year or the Premium plan for $99.99/year. Both also come with some extra features like social media backup and phone support.

If you’re looking for one app that takes care of everything, then Acronis true image is a good bet. You can have it take care of your local backups as well as your cloud backups.

Wrapping Up

Best Backup For Mac Computer

Backing up your files is incredibly important if you don’t want to lose them. Lots of people—myself included—have been caught out by a faulty hard drive in the past. As I mentioned at the top of this article, a single local backup really isn’t a strong solution. It’ll protect you against some things, but not against stuff like fire or theft. Ideally, you should have two or three independent backups. All the backup software for Macs on this list will help you do it.

[dandalf-the-disco]

5 things

I was tagged by the lovely lovely @oceaxereturns! 

5 Things You’ll Find in My Bag:

1. Travel charger.

2. At least three different kinds of lip balm.

3. Bobby pins, the gold-colored ones.

4. A WIP knitting project.

5. My bullet journal.

5 Things You’ll Find in My Bedroom:

1.  I live in a studio so my “bedroom” is really just the corner of the apartment where my bed is. But there is a TARDIS cupboard!

2. And fairy lights on the wall!

3. My oldest stuffed animal is usually hidden somewhere under my blankets.

4. There’s an enormous pull-out drawer thing full of yarn under my bed.

5. Also under my bed, a small and horrible old keyboard that I use to learn choir stuff with whenever I’m too lazy to open Musescore.

5 Things I’ve Always Wanted To Do in Life:

1. Learn to really love myself and not just “fake it ‘til you make it”.

2. Find someone to share my life with.

3. Achieve something good, even if it’s just making one person feel better about themselves.

4. Stop being so fucking self-absorbed.

5. Idk, honestly I try not to think too much about the future, bc I’m terrified that I’m never going to achieve anything and I’m just going to die scared, poor, and alone.

5 Things I’m Currently Into:

1. Getting back into writing.

2. Thinking about canon vs. fanon Eames.

3. Binge-watching guilty pleasure TV shows.

4. Oreos.

5. Just staying inside all day bc I’m too anxious to think about anything else hahah ahaha ha oh god please help me

5 Things on My To-Do List:

1. Send out an official job application to the graveyard for this year’s growing season.

2. oH FUCK I JUST REMEMBERED I’VE FORGOTTEN ALL ABOUT MY VALENTINE’S DAY CARDS 

3. Finish knitting a funky mathematical scarf, I’d link a WIP picture here but I want it to stay a surprise for @thewibblywobblystuff!

4. Finish writing my 5+1, which has been a WIP for a year. (YES, A YEAR.)

5. Do a bunch of choir board stuff! I need to reserve two churches, the university’s main auditorium for at least two separate occasions, a local school’s auditorium for four weekend rehearsals, and change our regular rehearsal place, in addition to which I need to actually remember to tell people about all these changes. Urgh.

5 Things People May Not Know About Me:

1. Despite being the loudest and most over-sharing person ever, I actually find it very hard to talk about ongoing problems. Like, I have no problems talking very openly about past struggles and offering any kind of advice I can, but I’m totally incapable of saying that something is wrong right now. 

2. I played the cello for years and years as a kid, but quit because my parents pressured me so much that it took away all the fun. I miss my “Disney for Cello” sheet music book!

3. My single biggest regret in life is my first girlfriend. 

4. Related to #3: I joke about being the black sheep of our family bc I don’t have a degree from university, but I have to joke about it, because if I think too hard about how I badly I ruined both my secondary and higher education I get a panic attack. I’m already crying just from writing that sentence.

5. Okay I really need to end this on a more cheerful note, so: I am so goddamn clumsy it’s unreal. Whenever my ex-flatmate would hear a loud thump followed by “ow” (which was quite often), she’d just ask what I walked into this time. Most of the time it was an open door. 

Tagging (if you’re interested): Not tagging anyone, but feel free to put me as the tagger if you want to do it!!

[blindrapture]

TA-DA

So a year ago, Eric and I released a nine-track album. We weren’t totally happy with it, and in the year since we’ve gotten a lot better at, like, sound mixing and file compression and actual songwriting composition shit. So we spent more time than one would expect reworking it! It is remastered, sounds beautiful with headphones! There’s bonus tracks (there’s more bonus material than actual album here)! There’s two, count ‘em, two commentary booklets (one fictional, one nonfictional)!

To better illustrate the point, let me quote the nonfictional booklet:

It’s worth explaining what, exactly, the Sunsetters are: Fiction. I write stories, and in my stories I like to sort of intertwine words and music, but there are these bullshit things called “copyrights” in this world, so over time I figured I could just pretend my words are based on musical things. For this purpose, I invented a rock band who exist in most of my works in some form or other, a rock band my characters can be fans of and quote lyrics from and whatever else is necessary. A good friend of mine, Jay, whipped up some album covers for this band, and I even dabbled in really dumb sample music (as in, ripped from samples) just to illustrate the point. For a long time, that is all that the Sunsetters were: A kinda cool idea, a fictional “underground 2000s prog metal band” that wrote songs about the dark gods I liked to explore.

Enter the man, the myth, the legend.

Eric is much more musically inclined than I am, and at the time he was considerably more inclined than I was. He liked my stories, and he liked the idea of these Sunsetters guys, and he was a bored high school senior, so he did what any rational-thinking human would do: He decided to write literally the entire Sunsetters discography. (Eric: For transparency, yes, I had no formal music theory training when I started writing for this. Still don’t, actually.)

At first, I helped tangentially. I did write “The Last Sunset” pretty early on, and amazingly the song hasn’t changed much since my original demo. I also had a demo for “Perfection” at one point. But most of what I did was just.. look at Eric’s stuff and wonder what it would sound like if performed by a live band; he did the bulk of the work. Then one day, we discovered that MuseScore, our writing software, has a playback function. And a versatile export function. And surprisingly customizable presets. There was actually a lot that MuseScore could do. And I, having only a clarinet and a Rock Band 3 keyboard to my name, could actually experiment with music.

The rest, while not history, is boring and exactly what you’d expect: We worked a lot, editing single notes sometimes, entire sections other times, playing with presets and volume levels and panning, experimenting with post-processing (deciding not to go for any for this debut), testing metadata, compiling songs again and again and again, compressing them, brainstorming, working on other albums and then coming back again and again and again, until eventually one day we just kinda… reached an end point.

Mythology took literally years to make (you could say half of that was Rise and the other half was remastering), and even now I could probably tinker with songs and mixing levels, but they say you have to know when to stop. These nine tracks, eight songs (and bonus tracks), that you hear are what we considered “when to stop.”

It’s meant to be a “classic underground 2000s metal album and also a debut album.” The final product tries to reflect, at least, what I would have considered a really good (debut) album of that era.

Welcome to the new music industry, folks. Welcome to the new fiction. Gone is the analog sound, gone is the analog production process, gone are the analog people. We can make music, we can make an entire band’s career, without actually making the band. We can make record companies without making the record companies. It’s all emulation, embraced. Somehow I find this the most EAT of a concept you can get.

Did I mention it’s a free download? :3 C’mon, check it out. You’d make me very happy.

[musicforfour]

The Monkey and the Onion, arranged for SATB Music by Graham Gouldman (10cc) Lyrics by Tim Rice I’m trying to remember how I first knew about Tim Rice. It’s probably from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals. I think when I first discovered Musical Theatre, I started with the very big and well known ones, so Lloyd Webber musicals came in quite early on. But I probably found out about Tim Rice when I’m way more deep into Musical Theatre when I started to figure out who were the people behind these musicals that wrote the music, the lyrics, and the book.

I find that Tim Rice is a unique figure in the world of Musical Theatre. He didn’t really start out with a background in Musical Theatre, unlike Andrew Lloyd Webber who was obsessed with the art form from the get go. In fact Tim was more into the pop records (rock and roll even, dare I say) and the current popular music scene. So he had been writing pop songs on his own before he met Andrew to start writing musicals with him. 

Besides their first musical which never really got put on until many many years later, they went on to create these classic sung through musicals like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita. Tim continued to write other musicals after the two went their separate ways. He wrote Blondel with Stephen Oliver, Chess (God I love Chess) with Benny Andresson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA (yes, The ABBA), some Disney musicals with Elton John and Alan Menken, and most recently From Here to Eternity with Stuart Brayson.

I think that Tim is unique in Musical Theatre in at least two ways. First is that he came up with these unlikely ideas for musicals, and they may seem odd at first, but he has a way to build a story and a way with words to actually make these weird ideas for musicals work. He is probably the only writer of musicals that is known for writing musicals about biblical stories. He even wrote one with Alan Menken about King David, which I hope it gets produced more often so maybe one day I can watch it in full. One more thing about Tim’s musicals is that he brought back the sung through musicals, like opera but with cooler music. It’s kinda funny that this happened only because he tried to keep the musicals short, like Joseph was first performed in a school concert or Jesus Christ Superstar was first recorded to fit the vinyl album. So yeah, I’ve spent the last four paragraphs explaining why I’m kinda obsessed with Tim Rice, just so I can say that I’ve been listening to his podcast “Get Onto My Cloud”. He started the podcast when the world stopped due to the pandemic in 2020, and he featured so many good background stories about his musicals and/or his songs for the episodes. So there’s this one episode about some one-off pop songs that he wrote, and he featured one of his songs titled The Monkey and the Onion for the English band 10cc. I think when I first heard the title, I wasn’t sure that I heard it right so I rewind it, but I did hear it right. And it was quite a cool song with, dare I say, philosophical lyrics that got to me.

So this song stayed in the back of my mind for awhile, and I have been looking for another song to arrange. I had wanted to do a song by Tim Rice, but I wanted to do something of his that wasn’t so obvious. I had thought maybe I was gonna do something from King David, but I had arranged Alan Menken’s music so I wasn’t really feeling it. So when I remembered about The Monkey and the Onion, I thought it’s now or never and I set out to arrange it.

The original recording of the song has this build up using instruments added on top of other instruments, so when I was arranging I realized I could never match what the original recording was doing ‘cause I was just using four voices. So I had to come up with other kinds of variations to keep the song going. Sometimes I used inversions of the chords for similar passages of music. I gave the melody to different sections (but not the Bass, sorry Basses). At one point I made the sections sing unison, and another point almost at the end I had just one section sing alone.

I also found this plug-in for Musescore that checks for parallel fifths and octaves, so I started to use this to check my arrangement. I knew from the start that writing parallel fifths and octaves is not quite acceptable for four part writing, but I only recently started to see why it’s bad. (Warning, mansplaining ahead) Basically writing parallels fifth and octaves make the parts sound unified, such that the four parts aren’t really four parts since one part is unified with another part when they have parallel fifths or octaves. 

I quite like the sound of two notes that are fifth apart, and I’m sure I’ve written a lot of parallel fifths without me knowing. It has this strong solid sound, and I remembered hearing it and really feeling it when I arranged for the first time. But now that I think about it, that time when I tried to arrange Sondheim, I think I wrote way too many parallel fifths that eventually it sounded too full and I couldn’t really go on with the same sound for the next verses. It’s kinda like eating a dessert cake that is way too rich and heavy, that you probably have enough before you finish a slice.    

So yeah, besides some parts where the sections sing in unison, I made sure that the four parts for my arrangement this time didn’t have any parallel fifths or octaves. I think each part sounded more clear and I intentionally had some parallel octaves like I bolded some words or underlined a phrase that I wanted to highlight. I like some of the chords that I found for this arrangement, and all in all I’m pretty happy to have found out about this song and to have shared this song by arranging it.  Tim Rice’s Podcast “Get Onto My Cloud”, Episode 25 “One-Offs”: https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/getontomycloud?selected=BPNET1445446315 Link to score: https://musescore.com/user/4177086/scores/6771052

[farsj]

A Musical Meme

There’s been a music meme going around with the following rules:

Rules: we’re snooping on your playlist!! Set your entire music library to shuffle and then report the first ten tracks that pop up! Then tag ten additional victims!

I thought it would be appropriate here at FARSJ to take the playlist I’ve made of songs I want to use at some point (possibly with modified lyrics) and do that with it. The Official FARSJ Playlist. (48 songs) This playlist consists of hymns from various traditions as well as “secular” music that I think has sacred value. (Note: I have a lot more hymns in MuseScore, but these are the ones I have recordings of.)

Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2 from War (hmm, quite a start)

Show Me The Way by Styx from Edge of the Century (I’d like to use it during a ritual with someone who’s struggling, esp. with discernment, or during a service where we’re looking for guidance.)

War Pigs by Black Sabbath (which I DID use during our veteran’s day service... found a great fan video (at least I’m assuming it’s a fan video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQUXuQ6Zd9w I definitely want to perform this like a soapbox preacher sometime. It’s one of the works that inspired me to do my ministry.)

Voices that Challenge by David Haas (”Call us to hear the voices that challenge deep in the hearts of all people. By serving the world as lovers and dreamers, we become voices that challenge, for we are the voice of Love!”)

Spirit of Life by Carolyn McDade as sung by the All Souls Choir (the quintessential UU hymn, even though she wasn’t UU. Like, srlsy, it’s the UU doxology. And it’s beautiful. Esp. if you can find a church singing 4 part harmony to it. Take a listen sometime.)

(the next song was the same hymn with a different recording (Orange County UU Choir from their album Family ValUUes.) Skipping to next...) Pride (In The Name of Love) by U2 from The Unforgettable Fire (Hmm, more U2! Interesting! although MLK was shot in the evening, not the morning. Eh, artistic license. “Free at last! They took your life, but they could not take your pride! In the name of love!”)

Another Day in Paradise by Phil Collins (because if you’re not crying already...)

What the World Needs Now Is Love by Dionne Warwick (how can I argue with this? This is what I mean about secular songs being sacred. How can a song about the world needing more love, not just for some, but for everyone be anything by holy?)

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For by U2 from The Joshua Tree (I didn’t realize I had that much U2 in this playlist. Apparently it found every one I have. Also good for a service w/ or about discernment/seeking.)

and we’re going REALLY Jesus Freaks hippy folk music on you, with Take All the Lost Home by Joe Wise (I don’t think I was supposed to have that one in here?)

BONUS TRACK! Do You Hear the People Sing? from Les Miserables (that fervor!)

I’m REALLY surprised that not more religious music came up in here, but I guess it’s because I’m super picky to only put stuff in that has little to no theism into this play list. (MuseScore has a TON more adapted church music.) (Also it might be I had problems with my Apple Music at one point and it took a bunch of stuff out of my playlists, and I might have forgotten to put it back. And I own most of the secular stuff, and “rent” a lot of the sacred via Apple Music.)

Do you have any songs you’d like to add? Does services with any of this interest you? Come join us sometime!