It did’nt take too long getting back into work mode after the holidays, thankfully had two Projects lined up for early September. One is a logo for a new artist/exhibition space venue in Limerick called H-Q. The brief was pretty specific including an Asian celebrity chef teapot as a design reference ;P Overall they want something very geometric and modern so I did a good bit of research into Aztec patterns and experimented with rotating/flipping designs in Illustrator. The building for the venue itself looks pretty interesting and some of its architectural features might come in handy for the logo or website design.
Music wise I’ve just signed up for a seven week counterpoint course via Alexanderpublishing.com. Its based on the classic Study of Counterpoint by Johann Joseph Fux, a book I’ve had for a while but struggled to get thru due to the use of language at the time (1725) aswell as the complicated nature of the material. I’ve been looking forward to doing this course for the last few months as harmony and counterpoint have always been the weakest areas in my compositions. It’s also been far too long since I’ve put pen to paper (or MIDI note to piano roll). In general I haven’t had much time this past year for production or composition work as the design (bread making) part of the business has taken priority. But as my workflow and skill set has improved some I hope to start giving more hours to both beginning in the new year.
Speaking of all things orchestral I very nearly splashed out a copy of East West Hollywood Strings sample collection (twas half price during the Labor day sale). Based on the audio samples and reviews it has a very realistic lush sound but is very heavy on system resources. I did some A/B comparisons with my own library as I considered the purchase but while doing so ended up testing out the MIRx extension for VSL (a simulated reverberation space for software based instruments). I had’nt tried this before and thought it was abit of a gimmick but I was very impressed with the results; ‘airy’ ‘warm’ real sounding spaces, a big improvement over the standard convolution reverb plugin. As a result I decided to stick with using VSL and Project Sam string libraries for the mock-up of the first soundtrack project.
