86 me

After far too many inconsistent and lackluster posts of late, I'm giving this a rest. Part of it is an attempt to fight the neverending battle against continuous partial attention and claim some brainspace back for my creativity. Part of it was finding more than a few morsels of truth in this essay entitled "Why I... Hate Blogs" (WARNING: this is LOADED with foul language). And part of it is that these days, I don't have much to share: I'm not travelling or gigging (by choice), I don't really want to talk about my current commission, and due to non-disclosure agreements, I can't write much about my work at Midway... that doesn't leave much to talk about!

But mostly, this process just doesn't feel inspired or inspiring lately. I may come back to this at some later date, and I might even post the odd entry now and then... but for now, I'm taking the expectation off of myself to come up with new and original stuff. So much so, that I'm not even going to come up with my last sentence -- I'm gonna steal it from Jim Morrison: this is the end, my beautiful friend, the end.

Oh, and thanks for reading.

I shot the drummer too

Remember when I had to shoot the piano-player? Ummm, yeah... I had to shoot the drummer too.

I'm a bad, bad man...

exciting emails

Got a couple great emails last week, figured I'd share...

One was from a director in Brisbane, Australia -- TranZendental Danse of Joi and Chaos Theory are going to have their Australian premieres this Spring!

Another was from a director/composer/arranger in Portugal -- Chaos Theory is going to have it's Portuguese premiere... with an ensemble whose musical tradition dates back to the 1800's!

And last but far from least, this was really touching -- I hope the writer doesn't mind if I post it:

Jim,

You probably don't remember me, but I played on your recordings of Courage and Compassion and Tranzendental Danse of Joi (flute and piccolo on both) that Milt Allen conducted. I'm writing to tell you just how wonderful my elementary students think Courage and Compassion is. We lost one of our third grade students this week in a car accident and I've been using the recording of Courage and Compassion as a calming and soothing piece of music for the children. So many of them have told me that they picture peacefulness and that it has helped make them feel stronger. Thank you for composing such a wonderful piece of music. I actually think I'll continue the listening time next week with Tranzendental Danse of Joi to hopefully lift their spirits some more.

So beautiful to hear that music can have such positive resonance...

More Chaos in the field

I just got a link to this slideshow of Chaos Theory... I suspect they didn't use a guitarist out on the gridiron, just went au natural... anyway, I thought I'd share...

http://jordan.fortwayne.com/ns/bands2006/newhaven/

spins-of-late

1. John Powell - X-Men III soundtrack
2. Steve Vai - Ultra Zone
3. Iron Maiden - Number of the Beast (good driving music)
4. Marco Beltrami - Underworld: Evolution soundtrack
5. Michael Daugherty - Metropolis Symphony/Bizarro

MK tunes

I'm hoping I will be able to post some tunes from Mortal Kombat: Armageddon sometime soon... I'm also hearing faint rumblings about a possible soundtrack release... in the meantime, here's a link to an excerpt from the Subway level music that's on the official MK:A website: it's a new arrangement of a classic tune from the arcade game, updated with a Nu metal vibe. CLICK HERE to check it out...

CBGB's... R.I.P.

Sad, sad, sad...

I shot the piano player

Let's face it, I have a strange job. Some days I bark like a dog. Other days I'm just flat-out screaming my face off. Today I had to come up the sounds of a piano-player falling over dead after they've been shot. Now for the sake of these examples, I've added a gunshot to the beginning, and I'll need a volunteer from the audience... ah, my sister. PERFECT.

So here's EXAMPLE 1: the pianist slumps forward (and slightly to the left) onto the lower register, and then slides off. Pretty simple and straightforward.

EXAMPLE 2 is a little over the top, but some might prefer it: the pianist falls onto the middle register, and the body slides down the keyboard for a dramatic flourish.

EXAMPLE 3 is the artsy-fartsiest version: the classic double-forearm smash... followed by a very subtle slide off the keyboard. If I could've shot Newman for this one, I would've (not because I want to shoot Newm, just because I thought of him when I played this one).

EXAMPLE 4 is definitely the most realistic: the left hand hits the lower keys, and the right hand hits the higher keys. I used my head to play the middle register. And yes, it did hurt. Quite a bit, in fact.

Ah, the things we do for our art...

Midway studio (pt. 2)

OK -- so here's the other half of the room... the business end of the studio. I'm going to go tech-lite here for the more casual reader, so if you have more in-depth questions about the gear, let me know...

This is the front of the room. 2 flat-screen monitors plugged into a Mac G5. This computer is where I do music and cinematic production. I use Digital Performer for writing and producing music tracks, and I'll compile music, dialogue and sound effects in Pro-Tools. I mix everything in the computer (even my outboard gear is routed in). That way I can save and recall my mixes very easily. That little mixing board with the red lights on the left [thanks Teo] is just a MIDI controller -- so I can tweak perameters easily. I have Mackie HR-824 studio monitors set up to hear what I'm doing over here. My Mac is loaded with virtual intruments and plug-ins, which I can go more into if people are interested...?

Here's a close-up of the my desk. Left-to-right: track-ball controller (saves my wrists when I've been working at the computer for extreme hours), buddha-dude, Samson C-control for monitoring, and my trusty E-bow (for making freaky-deaky guitar effects).

To the right of this is my PC rig -- yes, that's two 23" monitors stacked on top of one another. And no, it's not the smartest idea... but it hasn't fallen on me yet! This set-up actually goes to two separate PC's -- one is solely for Gigastudio samples, and the other is for mixing and mastering in Sound Forge and Vegas, documentation, emails, web-surfing... I can use both screens for both computers, so I have extra space to see what's going on with both computers.

Here's a close-up on this part of the desk: Xbox 360 controller (plugged into my PC -- used for testing out next-gen projects!), Siamese fortune cookies, weird brass thing I found in my Grandpa's attic, the right speaker on a pair of Cambridge Soundworks mini-speakers (set up to give me a second opinion on my mixes), a photo of me and Nicki, my old crappy phone, a genero mouse for right-handed people who come into my room and hate my track-ball (infidels!!), a drawing by Ian Simmons, a bottle of water, and a styrofoam cup.

The last bit of my room is a shelf to keep all the manuals and tech-info for all this gear, a corkboard for stuff I need to refer to often, and a little table-space so I can write stuff down. There are a few CD's in a pile, my drumsticks, some writable CD's, and a pile of miscellaneous shmutz in the right hand corner. I keep things pretty organized over here, mainly because I HATE searching for stuff when I'm trying to get something done!

Which brings to a wall calendar and a filing cabinet (sorry, no photos), and then back to the door. I hope you enjoyed the tour, and hope the pictures weren't too dark... feel free to ask questions. I'm out.

Midway studio (pt. 1)

Hey folks, I've been at a loss lately to come up with stuff to blog, so I figured I'd take you on a tour of my studio/writing room at Midway games. Here we are at the door to my room:

As if having my name on the door wasn't enough, I decided to personalize it by sticking this button on the nameplate. I got it out of a gumball machine over at Hot Doug's... I'm a total sucker for those things.

Sorry if it's hard to see details in these pictures (if you want good photos, go to Mackey's blog) -- I have only one lamp on low in the corner of the room, so it's perpetually twilight in here. It seems to imbue a more creative atmosphere... and it's not as easy to see the dust... this is the back wall. It's a pretty simple setup -- an average TV, and an average surround sound home stereo system. Right now, there is a PS2 dev kit and an Xbox dev kit plugged into it -- so I could test Mortal Kombat while I was designing it, and hear how it would sound on the average consumer's home theater system. Pretty soon, I'll replace these dev kits with Xbox 360 and PS3 dev kits... note the extra guitar amps in the bottom right corner, and the stack of guitar cases on the far right...

If you turn to the wall facing the door, you find my dartboard -- good for quick distractions when creatively constipated. Writer's block? Throw some darts. I suppose I could use the time to dust instead, but I prefer the darts. Underneath is a cardboard promo piece for "Psi-Ops" -- it's there to protect the wall from my suckier throws. And under that is a milk crate FILLED with guitar stomp boxes. Next to that is another guitar case, and in the bottom right-hand corner, you can see the POD amp simulator that's mounted off my keyboard rack...

Which brings us to the keyboard rack. On the top, I have a Korg Karma, and on the bottom there's a Yamaha EX5. Underneath there are more racks of rarely used outboard synths and samplers -- as well as my MIDI and audio interfaces. On the right, you can see my blood-red Strat, ready and waiting to be plucked.

Now usually, I'll have a whole slew of guitar pedals patched together in front of this rack, but I had to tidy the place up for an AES presentation here recently (yeah, I even dusted), so I only have two out right now. The one on the left is this ancient Morley Pro Phaser that is just so strange and weird it's awesome. The one on the right is a Morley "Bad Horsie" wah wah -- the same kind Steve Vai uses. I used these two pedals and a Digitech Whammy pedal to record that trippy Solo Improv I posted a while back...

That's two walls of the studio. Next time I'll get into the real meat-and-potatoes, the true heart-and-soul, the... the... well, stay tuned.

Stranger than Fiction

In a news media moment that can only be described as truly bizarre, it seems my buddy Eric has come across a bit of press that, to my mind, challenges the Charles O. Finley quote, "I don't care what you say about me, as long as you spell my name right."

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061003

(You don’t have to read it all, just keep scrolling... don’t worry, you’ll find it...)

Remember, this is ESPN -- SPORTS NEWS.

On second thought, maybe I wouldn't care so much if my albums had spent the weekend as #1 and #3 on the Amazon Classical bestseller list, and one was also the #14 Amazon bestseller OVERALL... YEAH DUDE!!!

It's official...

MORTAL KOMBAT: ARMEGGEDON HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR X-BOX AND PS2 IN THE U.S. AND EUROPE!!!

RELEASE DATE: October 9th