On tubas, flutes, and femmes fatales
Howdy!
This newsletter will have: an essay on experimenting with scoring to picture (so if you were hoping for writing craft neepery, maybe next time?), a random hexarchate art piece, a FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions), a pic of the world's most beautiful steampunk journal, and a catten pic.
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Recently I decided to take the plunge and enter a scoring contest with what looked like reasonable terms. I do NOT expect to place or anything like that! Rather, I've wanted to play with scoring to picture (= composing music for preexisting provided locked video), the contest had a motivational deadline, and the video was under a minute and a half, which seemed very doable. Due to health stuff, I'm very slow right now, so the task took me three days, including sitting down and analyzing scene changes down to SMPTE timecode (basically the timing of the frames). I'm sure a professional would have gotten it done in under a day if they usually work at a rate of 2-5 minutes of full score/day or however that goes.
One of my favorite things about composing orchestral music is, well, orchestration! Each instrument or combination of instruments or articulation has a personality and vibe. I will never forget polling my DW blog about "the most femme fatale instrument" and someone didn't like the cliché of (concert) flutes being "feminine," although not "femme fatale feminine" (although I admit I think of James Galway, or alternately shakuhachi music for samurai swordfights!). I remarked that if Disney hired me to score their Beauty and the Beast and I assigned Belle to the tuba, they would fire me on the spot. Look, it's a fallen world.
Anyway, I wanted to gesture toward the "vibe" of the visuals (a lot of woodland stuff) as well as featured instruments when they show up in clips. My friend Marie Brennan, who besides being a writer (the Lady Trent books, and the Rook & Rose books in collaboration with Alyc C. Helms under the joint pen name M.A. Carrick), has experience with wind/brass instruments and plays/used to play French horn. She helped me ID some of the instruments, because I can tell an oboe from a clarinet visually if you show me the full instrument, but not if it's a close-up shot of the middle. (English horn, forget it. I've never been up close to one.) I did NOT attempt to match my music to whatever the featured instrumentalists were playing—for one thing, these were probably discontinuous clips for visual effect out of some larger composition (assuming they came from the same piece at all). For another, I might be able to reverse-engineer the notes for a violin or viola or guitar by studying the fingerings. Oboe or clarinet, forget it; it would be too much effort for marginal returns, anyway.
I could have sworn I threw every cliché in the book at the problem. You know: Floating ethereal soprano legato patch intro. French horns and trumpets for the battle scene. Enter the drums at the fiery transition; I auditioned taiko drums but they didn't work for me in this context. A duduk and some kind of hammered dulcimer hybrid instrument (from Spitfire Audio's Albion Solstice) for the forest. Strings, of course; they're advertising an orchestra package. (I used Impact Soundworks' Tokyo Scoring Strings with a touch of reverb, as that particular library is fairly dry.)
Also, I'm 100% department of cheap tricks for Baby's First Score to Picture Exercise. If you need to switch instruments a bit before the beat or measure boundary or whatever, just throw on a grace note or mordent or something! Ornaments are the best. :3 I only messed a little with tempo changes. I didn't want to Mickey Mouse this (it wouldn't have been meaningful and IIRC the technique is out of favor unless you're scoring comedy or kids' cartoon type things?), but I did put some e.g. percussion hits at key moments. That kind of thing.
I think 500 years from now if anyone ever listens to any music I wrote, they're going to finger me because of the extremely predictable way I like to use major and minor seventh chords in harmonic progressions, lol.
(I quipped to my sister that the 1st place winner would be some brilliant hyperminimalist pentatonic flute solo with some bird noises pasted on top and she retorted that she didn't think that would fly for an all-in-one orchestral library advert. That said, if someone produced, say, a Gli Uccelli for something like this, I'd be tempted to give them a prize!)
I cannot tell you whether the music is any good as standalone music, or as a faked up advertisement score. I'm too close to it. My sister thinks that I overestimate how tropey I got with the scoring.
I expect that scoring to picture is kind of like composing (or most things?). I keep having to tell people: composing is easy. I mean, at worst, just assign some notes using an RNG and there you go. Composing well is hard.
So, scoring to picture? I mean, you can always slap a clip from a public domain piece of music over the video and call it done. (And to be clear, you can do that to great effect! I saw an animated short that used one of Satie's Gymnopédies this way and it was lovely.) I imagine learning to do it well is hard.
But it was fun and I learned a lot and it was an excellent distraction during sickness, so I got what I came for. :3
(The YouTube video is here, for the curious.)
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Latest random Jedao art ca. Revenant Gun, because I was feeling mean. I swear I have a Cheris WIP, but I'm not happy with the color study, so I went with the one that I could figure out more easily.
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FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions)
What are you working on?
Still partway through the rough draft of Lancers #2. Also taking a four-session screenwriting course, which is super fun!
How's your health?
Vexed, alas. I'm taking things one day at a time. The good news is that they've ruled out the Big Scary Things. That said, it's a little alarming on a meta level when you see the doctor and she schedules you for a same-day emergency CT scan and sends you downstairs to Radiology and ten minutes later they call you in to start prep. It's a bad sign when the hospital is that efficient.
What's one thing that you're reading right now?
Natasha Dow Schüll's Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, which I found out about when writer Rachel Brown blogged about it. Honestly, this is a terrifying portrait of the dark, destructive side of game design, interface design, math, and psychology being weaponized against people to get them addicted for profit. I'll have more to say about this once I've finished reading it.
What are you listening to lately?
A friend introduced me to the k-pop girl group NewJeans. Here's one of their MVs for "Ditto."
What's a game you're playing lately?
Ha, I'm still playing Steve Jackson's Sorcery! on the Nintendo Switch (THANK YOU, Generous Benefactor!). I'm terrible at the combat system, but it's fun, and I love the extra content that wasn't present in the original gamebooks. I think from a gameplay standpoint, the adaptation is doing a great job. In particular, the adaptation of the Spell Book magic system is brilliant! And the game doesn't require twitch reflexes, so that's nice too. :3
By the way, if TV Tropes is to be believed, the Hebrew translation of those gamebooks adapted the three-letter codes for spells in conjunction with the language's triconsonantal morphology, which sounds brilliant! I don't speak any of the Semitic languages, but a conlang I worked on in high school and college kinda sorta used triconsonantal morphology (Naracze, if anyone remembers me from 20+ years ago on the Brown U. conlang listserv, ahahaha).
What's an alternate universe you'd like to live in? Can be an established fictional universe or one you make up on the spot.
Well, the hexarchate is at the BOTTOM of my list because (a) hello, horrifying dystopia and (b) ALL MY CHARACTERS WANT TO KILL ME. It is a household joke that if my characters come to life, I am sooooo screwed. (Except Arazi, who is a pacifist, but isn't from the hexarchate...)
I think I would enjoy living in one of the shifter romance realities of Zoe Chant's books, especially if I got to be a shifter, dammit. I would like to be a fox or hawk, but in real life, I would be a very lazy housecat.
I have a foxy question you haven't answered here!
Sure, please email deuceofgearsart@gmail.com and I'll get back to you!
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I committed the World's Most Beautiful Steampunk Journal off Etsy after surviving the ER on Sunday a week ago.
The artist is BronzedCURLZ on Etsy and I may be back for more of their stuff; I'm tempted to commit a box one of these days!
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And, of course, obligatory catten pic:
Let's just say the catten knows how to get our attention when it is time for SCRITCHES. :3