Today the Trolls Holiday Special was released. For the opening scene I transcribed the demos and prepared the sheet music for the Trolls recording session with Justin Timberlake, Anna Kendrick, and James Corden. The short film from Dreamworks Animation continues the Trolls’ adventures, this time trying to bring holidays to the Bergens, who do not have any. The film starts out with the Trolls singing their hyped-up version of the 1973 soul song Love Train by the O’Jays.
Dare To Drum: A Documentary
Previously released on Amazon and just just released today on iTunes:
A fascinating documentary called Dare To Drum about a daring 3-year musical endeavor, the creative process, and the week of chaos that nearly killed the premiere concerts.
In 2011 I worked with composer Stewart Copeland to put on a concert that combined a full Indonesian gamelan orchestra with a traditional western orchestra. A whole new custom gamelan had to be built to manage the disparate tunings, and I needed to invent a lot of new notation for the vast array of percussion which is traditionally not written down.
Three years of instrument building and artistic work went into the whole process, the percussion ensemble D’Drum was commissioned to bring it to life, and then the premiere with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra was nearly canceled due to freak snow storms in Texas. The whole city was snowed in Thurs-Sun and it looked like everything was going to fail miserably, but luckily the last show on Sunday night happened and it was a brilliant success.
Stewart’s music is fantastic as always, the guys from D’Drum are brilliant musicians, and Jaap van Zweden was a fierce conductor just right for this ambitious endeavor. I highly recommend this documentary to all who have an interest in world music, alternative uses of the orchestra, and real-life documentary drama.
The film’s website is DareToDrumFilm.com.
I was primarily the music copyist and engraver for Stewart Copeland and G. Schirmer, but I also had a little bit of input as an additional orchestrator.
Say Lou Lou single release – Ana
Say Lou Lou is an Australian/Swedish dream pop duo formed by twin sisters Elektra and Miranda Kilbey. They’re impressively talented and a real pleasure to work with.
Today they released a new single called Ana, the first the a new album project we worked on together. I was the copyist for our string orchestra recording sessions at Capitol Records in Hollywood which was led by Paul Cartwright. It’s one of my favorite places to work because Capitol literally has the absolute best of everything, and everything Paul touches has a little bit of magic in it.
Orchestrating for video game Diablo III: Rise Of The Necromancer
Out today: Diablo III Rise of the Necromancer is the lastest expansion pack for the dungeon crawler action role-playing video game from Blizzard Entertainment. Diablo has sold 30 million units and has 3 million daily players.
Necromancer adds a new class to the gameplay, new weapons, new armor, and of course new music! As with all Blizzard projects the resources available to us are massive, so we had another very large orchestra to work with. This time around I was orchestrating with Penka Kouneva for composer Erik Desiderio, a fellow composer here in Los Angeles.
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Orchestrator for composer Erik Desiderio
2017
Studio: Blizzard Entertainment
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Orchestrator for composer Erik Desiderio
2017
Studio: Blizzard Entertainment
Aero Origins wins Best Web Series
After already touring Sundance and Cannes, Aero Origins, a project I orchestrated for composer Christine Hals, has now also been nominated for Best Web Series by the FilmQuest festival. Congrats to the Aero Origins team and Desertski Films! We once again recorded the orchestral score with the stellar musicians from Budapest Scoring. It will be screened at FilmQuest on September 14 in Provo, Utah.
Orchestrating for Christine Hals, live concert in Bulgaria
Three weeks ago I was orchestrating again for the excellent Norwegian composer Christine Hals. Tonight she is conducting the music in a live concert in Ruse, Bulgaria. The piece is called Storms of Freya, and it depicts some elements of the Nordic weather of her home country. We spent a lot of time depicting the weather with very specific and experimental textures, and the end result is just as good as we imagined. Christine was conducting the Rousse Philharmonic Orchestra as part of the Los Angeles Film Conducting Intensive (LAFCI).
You can see a video of Christine conducting Storms of Freya piece here.
The Son starring Pierce Brosnan
The Son from AMC Studios is a multi-generational epic telling of the story of America’s birth as a superpower through the bloody rise and fall of one Texas oil empire. Starring Pierce Brosnan, it’s halfway through the first season. Episode 10 came out today, for which I was on the music team working with Penka Kouneva as orchestrator and music copyist for composer Nathan Barr. Much of the score is recorded here in Los Angeles in Nathan’s studio.
Queen Latifah at the Boston Pops
My team and I just finished a big rush of score preparation for Queen Latifah and the Boston Pops, and tonight she played the opening night of the Pops summer season. Many thanks to Brian Benison for giving me the gig, orchestrator Dontae Winslow for being fun to work with, and Allison Piccioni and Darren Otero for their invaluable help on this project! We generated 35 pounds of sheet music for this show JUST in time, but it worked out beautifully.
Sheet Music, the map to your score – article in The Score
I have written another front page article for The Score, the quarterly journal of the Society of Composers and Lyricists. This article is a quick how-to guide about the fastest ways to get music out of a sequencer or DAW and into printed notation as quickly as possible. In it I share some tips and tricks from my two decades of experience in sheet music preparation that may help to improve or streamline your processes, hopefully resulting in more free time and better art.