Spy Theme Excerpt 01

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Spy Theme Excerpt 01

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Author Comments

I bought some new software awhile back and this was the first thing I did with it. It's a lot shorter than I would have liked it to be, but I had to both learn the software as well as book up on my jazz orchestration/arrangement chops. This piece is now pretty old, but I was reminded of it as I'm currently working on a similar project.

This is heavily influenced by Dizzy Gillespie's Theme From the Cool World (which I'm convinced influenced a lot of Yoko Kanno's work on Cowboy Bebop). The first alt chord is stolen from Yoko Kanno.

Critiques and general feedback are much appreciated. I'm always trying to learn and grow. I'm also actively looking for more work. If you're interested in some custom music message me for more examples and general details.

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sabre01

2022-07-24 21:47:01

Just ran across this and absolutely love it! Definitely downloading!

DynastyMarino

2016-02-17 21:48:32

That's another download! :D

TaintedLogic

2015-06-28 23:52:21

Wow, I just love these short, jazzy tunes! The drama at the beginning was good, but I was a bit confused by the pacing shortly after. This is going to be nit-picky. I thought you were going for a classic Forte-piano and then rapid crescendo during the first 5 seconds, but the crescendo never really came. This made the transition into the sneaky-sounding piano at :06 fall flat IMO. The first chord sort of brings this energy into the piece that is quickly reset and made more mellow. I just thought it threw the listener off a bit to have a dramatic intro perhaps predicting a fast-paced piece, while the rest of the piece progressed rather slowly. That said, the part at :06 and beyond is moody, charming, full-textured, smooth-flowing, and generally has all of the ideal compositional values I look for in a piece. I admire your sense of rhythm and harmony. It's a very catchy track. You should go for a full-length track sometime where you can really space out your ideas. :06 to 1:28 would make a great intro for a 5-6 minute track. I know that this piece already feels relatively conclusive as it is (I see you used the classic tonic octave-jump), but more development and structuring is necessary for this to be a truly complete piece IMO. Like I said, though, this review is extremely nit-picky. Your compositional skills are already rather good, and the mix seemed pretty tight as well. Keep at it, man! ;D

sleepFacingWest responds:

Good ears! I actually WANTED to do that sforzando into crescendo, but I couldn't make it go. This was the first piece I had written with this software and I was learning how some of the articulations worked. Despite pushing various envelopes around, I couldn't get them to swell without reattacking with a new sample. I could have crossfaded between samples, but I didn't have the processing power to run that much at the time. Now I would probably double up a lot of the horns with samples from a symphonic set to fatten them anyway, so I could use proper crescendos from another library and then balance the two in post production.

And thank you! I REALLY appreciate nit-picky. Your commentary is absolutely spot on. I was focused more on learning the new library while writing this one, so I slacked a bit compositionally. Originally I had intended to write a very driving manic jazz track, but I realized that A) the software I had gotten is actually quite hard to work with and everything sounds like crappy general midi from the 90's without a TON of edits, and B) My jazz arranging chops were rusty as I hadn't used them in years and just remembering how to idiomatically harmonize melodies in 5 parts was a bit of a struggle. In short, I bailed on the idea to do an "action jazz track" because it got difficult. That said, I'm definitely more prepared to do this sort of thing now and think that perhaps it's time to revisit it!

boredtopickname

2015-06-15 14:11:30

i like the way you think this was a good saxophone perfomance and brought me back in the blues time

sleepFacingWest responds:

thanks!