Posts tagged "recordings"

It's been a busy few months. Among other things, I've been finishing up my second semester of jazz arranging at UNT, which included two major projects I'd now like to share here.

First, I've written my first big band arrangement since high school. The assignment was to arrange a jazz standard, so I chose an old favorite of mine: Rogers and Hart's I Could Write a Book. The following recording was done by the UNT Three O'Clock Lab Band last week; I believe the trombone soloist is David Winniford.

I Could Write a Book

I felt pretty good about the project overall. Still a few things I'd fix if I had it played again, though—for one thing, I don't think I really understand how to use the trumpet section in the middle register. For a first go-round, though, this isn't half bad.

Immediately following the big band project, we were assigned something a bit simpler: write an original 32(ish)-bar tune, get it recorded, and turn in the lead sheet. I named my project "Like Waking Up," which is how I've sometimes described the experience of studying music again after such a long hiatus. The personnel on this recording are me on trombone, Tim Chernikoff on piano, Cliff Chen on bass, and Greg Sadler on drums.

Like Waking Up

Also, for what it's worth, I've added a Facebook "Like" button to all of my blog pages; if you enjoyed these recordings and you want to share them with your friends, click the button and a link to this blog post should show up in your Facebook news feed. At least I think that's how it works; haven't really tested it yet :)

Thanks for listening!

Although my day job is in IT, I've also got a very strong background in music. I am available for gigs and recordings as time allows; this post serves as a partial list of my various musical endeavors to date, for those interested.

Read more...

The first major project in this semester's jazz arranging class was a simple, 8-bar melody orchestration for brass and rhythm section—all told, no more than 15 seconds of music. The idea was to give us an opportunity to hear how we're doing before applying what we know to a full-length big band chart. The project was due on Monday, and we recorded them all live in a two-hour demo session Wednesday afternoon (I got to play in the trombone section, which was both fun and repetitive).

In keeping with tradition, I thought I'd post a recording of my project, along with a few comments. To tell you the truth, before I heard it out loud with the right instrumentation, I thought I had done a pretty good job. Once I did hear it, it still wasn't terrible—but there are a few things I wish I had done differently. Here, to begin with, is the recording:

Just Friends, 8-Bar brass orchestration

And, for reference, the score:

And now, some comments:

1. In bars 4-6, I decided to go with unison trumpets supported by trombones in density (one of several stock techniques we've been learning). I do like the effect, but the trombone harmonies I decided on are extremely plain. If I did this exercise again, I'd probably change the chord on beat 3 of bar 5 to add some extra color. Either that, or have the trombone chord slide up a half step and then back down again with the trumpet lead.
2. The trombone rhythms in 4-6 are completely out of sync with the trumpets. If nothing else, move both half notes back one eighth note to line them up with the trumpets, and take out that silly punch on beat 1 of bar 6 (the rhythm section can handle the setup for beat 2 just fine on its own).
3. I'm also not a fan of my trombone lead lines; I chose them more with regard to their intervallic relationship with the lead trumpet than for their own melodic integrity. I'm especially unhappy with beats 1-2 of bar 6, where the lead trombone actually moves down a third at a key climax of the passage—it just doesn't seem to fit. Either of the above two corrections, however, would seem to fix this problem by keeping the intensity relatively high until after bar 6.

So, hopefully by writing this down I will have solidified these particular lessons in my head, and might be able to avoid them on my full big band chart. That's due in April, so if you follow along, I imagine you'll get to find out if I succeed or not.

Those who know me well know that I really, really hate to throw away data. I have all kinds of stuff sitting around on my home server, some of it dating all the way back to middle school, and most of it of very little interest to anyone today (even me). Well, the other day I stumbled across something that was sort of interesting: trombone practice recordings I'd made early on in college.

For as long as I've been a musician, my teachers have told me that one of the best ways to discover where you need to improve is to record yourself playing; for some reason, however, I've rarely bothered.

It's partly a discipline problem—I've never been as consistent a practicer as I should be—but I think it may also have something to do with my data obsession. When I make a recording, I don't just listen to it a few times, note the things I need to fix, and then throw it away. No, I think to myself, "what if I want to listen back to this five years from now and hear if I've improved?" And so I keep it, and not just as an MP3…no, I keep the original, huge, lossless WAV file. For-ev-er.

Now, this used to take up one heck of a lot of space, and a lot of manual backup effort too. As a result, I would rarely do it …too much effort to archive a daily audio practice session when I've got other things I need to store in that precious space.

These days I don't worry about that, for two reasons:

1. Storage is cheap. I have a 500GB RAID-1 network attached storage device in my living room. If it fills up (which won't be happening soon), I'll just get bigger drives; they don't cost that much in the long run.
2. Not all compression is lossy. If I re-encode my original WAVs to lossless FLACs via some automated process, I can store them in half the space and still play them back without uncompressing …no data loss, and very little loss of convenience.

As a result, I've started recording my practice sessions again. This has had a few important benefits:

1. I can listen to my playing after the fact, discovering issues I didn't notice the first time around.
2. I actually practice regularly, since I don't want my archives to be missing a day when (if?) I look back into them five years from now.
3. Also, I've found it a lot easier to notice the negative effects of skipping a day of practicing.

But at the end of the day, the best benefit is that I'm starting to recover some of my old improv chops. I've still got a long ways to go, but it's really encouraging to feel somewhat skilled at the trombone again.

Well, my first semester of jazz arranging at UNT is drawing to a close; it's been a great experience, and I'm looking forward to doing some big band writing next semester. I feel like I've learned a heck of a lot, and gotten over some of the hurdles that usually get in my way when I want to write something. So that's good, right?

Anyway, I thought I'd go ahead and post a couple of the better recordings; one of the nice things about studying at UNT is that there are plenty of musicians available that can read your charts down for you without any trouble. These recordings are mostly performed by my fellow class members; I haven't listed them here, but if you're one of them and you'd like me to list your name, just say so in the comments (and feel free to link to your own website as well).

I'm not terribly proud of my own playing on these, but that's not what they're for anyway …this is about the writing, and I think I did OK on that front. Here goes:

• Sax Soli for Joy Spring
• Circular (original composition)
• The More I See You