Some of Bear McCreary's Galactica music

Those of you who have read my posts on Battlestar Galactice might have picked up on the fact that I mentioned film composer Bear McCreary's blog and his music quite a bit. He's the young guy who scored the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica TV series. You may or may not have been impressed by what you heard on the TV show but take a listen to what's on youtube:



The youtube versions sound better to me.



Hear that electric violin? For me that was the sound I first started responding to. If I can remember Bear's blog on that correctly, that violinist is Paul Cartwright. Bear must have used some electronic trick to soften out the tone, in concert those violins wind up sounding like electric guitars or they're too harsh.

It was the first sound I tried to imitate.



These are some of my favorite, roughly in the order of how much I like them.



Does anybody think that without Bear's music setting the tone that Battlestar Galactica would have become the breakout hit it became? That's not a rhetorical question. I wonder about that, what influence music has on these shows. Would I have ever thought that Forbidden Planet or The Day the Earth Stood Still were sci-fi classics if not for Bernard Herrmann?

Turn me on to your music

What do you listen to? Is there some band out there I've probably never heard of that really excites you? If so, drop me a link in the comments here, or just a name and I'll look them up on youtube or myspace.

I've asked this favor of my readers before and I got a couple interesting new groups to listen to. For example, Michael (MPhil) turned me on to Cynic:

Cynic - Adam's Murmur

Cynic - Evolutionary Sleeper

Cynic - Integral Birth

Cynic - Traced in Air

sinned34 turned me on to Opeth:

Opeth - Circle Of The Tyrants

Opeth - In My Time Of Need

Shadowstreak turned me on to Mortification and Paramecium:

Look Away - The Paramecium

Just reading Bear McCreary's blog I found a couple interesting groups named, Muse and Ozric Tentacles:

Supermassive Black Hole - Muse

Ozric Tentacles - "Coily"

I don't know what the odds are that you've heard any of those bands but I think I can come up with some groups you've never heard of. For example, here's an interesting little Christian Death Metal band called "The Drama Scene."

They're just now putting out their first album it seems and you won't find them on youtube. They've just got thses samples on myspace. I liked "The Devil's Among Us" and "My Razorblade."

And what are the odds you ever heard of Hawkwind:

Hawkwind - Master of the Universe

Hawkwind - Space Is Deep

Hawkwind was a group I liked when I was in high school but never listened to again after I got to college... until recently when I looked them up on youtube.

Another group you may not have heard of, Eyehategod:

Eyehategod - 99 Miles Of Bad Road

Eyehategod - Lack Of Almost Everything

Of course, obscure groups aren't the only kind I listen too, they're just the only ones I'm noting in this post. But I will mention Ozzy because Ozzy's music has been with me since I first heard Black Sabbath in high school and I've never stopped listening:



So, tell me what music you listen too.

UPDATE:

Wow! Lots of music to check out thanks to all you people. And following your links on youtube and myspace leads to yet more related bands. If you're a Death Metal/Black Metal fan the numbers of groups out there is overwhelming. It's a world wide phenomena.

There is Russian Black Metal and also Death Metal:



There is also Japanese Death Metal and Chinese Black Metal:





And does any of this look and sound familiar?

And here's an interesting artist you can find on Kompoz.

UPDATE 2:

This band recommendation comes from Bear McCreary:



Bear wrote:

Captain Ahab - This guy works with me all the time, but his records are incredible. In fact, I’m actually doing orchestral arrangements on his upcoming album. But, the last two are outstanding. It’s crazy, insane, occasionally very offensive techno and dance music, but there is a sadistic sense of humor to all of it. Like songs by the South Park guys, his music is funny and also intelligently satirical all at the same time.

A summary of Bear's other recommendations with semi-relevant links (see the comment on his own website for more details but no links): Boingo, 1994 album by Danny Elfman’s band Oingo Boingo, also their previous album “Dark at the End of the Tunnel” (1990). (A lot of “BG” musicians (Bartek, Avila, Vatos, Doug Lacy) playing on both these records). Ozomatli, 2001 release “Embrace the Chaos,” especially “Vocal Artillery.” Warning: their most recent record is to be avoided though. Bt4, his brother. Raya Yarbrough, his wife. Buckwheat Zydeco, and then of course bands we all should know: Queen, Pink Floyd, Guns n’ Roses (not so much the new record), Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy, Al Green, Supertramp, The Specials, Elvis, Michael Jackson and The Band. Film and TV scores, his stock in trade, favorites are: Elmer Bernstein: To Kill a Mocking Bird and / or his RPO Pops “Best Of” CD. Jerry Goldsmith: Alien, The ‘burbs, Gremlins 2, Stark Trek: The Motion Picture. Bernard Herrmann. Lalo Schifrin: Enter the Dragon. John Williams, Temple of Doom and Empire Strikes Back were always my favorites.

How I make music, part 1

If you take a look at my box.net files, here:
http://www.box.net/shared/16vmbxot2g

You'll see I have some .wav music files there. A couple of those .wavs are getting more hits than my blog, something over sixty downloads already on one file, "Zarek's Dead." I think that's because I posted a link to it over on Bear McCreary's blog and Bear said, "Awesome performance of the Zarek theme! Very spooky." But he also noted that I goofed one note, in the fourth bar, the whole note D# was played as a C#.

Take a listen to a few pieces, and if you like, read on and I'll show you how it's done so you can make your own music.

My music is all done with free software. I haven't played a musical instrument in over a decade (in high school I was in a rock and roll band). The most important bit of free software is the Audacity Audio Editor. Several pieces were done with nothing but the Audacity Audio Editor (scifi001.wav, scifi0e0.wav, SCIfiFX00.wav and aliendeep.wav) and some plug-ins to that editor.

Some of those plug-ins are going to create the instruments needed to play Squid Metal.

The others, the Zarek .wavs and computer_heaven.wav required two other pieces of software; a trial version of "Notation Composer" and the trial version of "AudioConverter Studio 5.9." I have limited time with the trial version of "Notation Composer," but there are more such programs out there.

The "violin(s)" in the Zarek files were originally just MIDI instruments, actually they're a stack of MIDI instruments, a few violins, a distortion guitar, an overdriven guitar, etc.. The weird sounds in the computer_heaven file are several different stacks, an xylophone in one ensemble, a flute in another. They all got so distorted by the processing I put them through that they sound alien and weird.

If you use any of the music composition software I've so far seen then you'll have already seen that you can create any kind of ensemble of instruments you like from a standard MIDI collection. You should also be able to output a MIDI file (.mid) from your software. The problem is that MIDI instruments don't sound that good. So, I then take the MIDI file and convert it to a .wav file using AudioConverter Studio and then I use the Audacity Audio Editor to manipulate the .wav file. After that it no longer sounds like MIDI because I can add some human expressive qualities to it with Audacity.

I can, and will, describe some of this process in future posts if readers comment here and ask for more. It involves adding "echo fifths" and "gong model distortions" and I doubt that those terms mean anything to many readers out there. I'll need to know where my readers are as far as their knowledge goes before I can describe more.

The background_sinister.wav is the only one I haven't mentioned yet. It was made by distorting the noises of a construction site.

Now, before I ramble on and on about how I made the music I'll just let any interested readers out there ask questions and my next music posts will answer them. I suggest getting the software and just playing with it -- that's all I really did. Maybe someone out there can teach me some even better tricks. I've only been toying with this software for less than two weeks. I can't know that much.

Does anyone want to know more?

Anyone out there know where I can get more music software or any neat tricks?

Free music software; MagicScore Classic 5

I just downloaded a free program for writing and playing music called "MagicScore Classic 5." If you're interested you can start here to learn more:

http://www.musicaleditor.com/

The version I have is a freeware version of "MagicScore Classic 5," it's music composing and composition software and the full package would cost somewhere around $59.95 or $69.95, a more expensive version, called "MagicScore Maestro 6," is selling for $109.65 if you want more advanced functionality.

Both programs use the same common musical grammar you might have learned in any music theory class. The kind of theory you can learn or, like me, brush up on, at Ricci Adams' Musictheory.net or at Think Quest.

That means that if you're following Bear McCreary's blog you can copy his little snippets of music notation onto the music bars and play the music in lots of different kinds of virtual instruments and even compose for an orchestra or band.

In fact, someone who can’t read music, The19thNervousCylon, on Bear's blog asked if Bear could do some type of HTML coding whereby the music notes Bear showed could be played as an audio snippet, something clickable. However, Bear said he was swamped just doing the blog and scores, but it was a revision he'd think about in the future.

It would seem that MagicScore has such a feature, an online player I can link through my blog. As soon as I learn how to use it I may subject my poor readers to the next evolution in Metal; Squid Metal. It will come from a band that doesn't exist, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis.

Other than that I'm not entirely sure what else the MagicScore software does, but it apparently does a lot. (I've only played with it for a day or so.) You can import and export scores in MusicXML, MIDI nd karaoke format. The standard editing features are there; copy, paste, delete, and transpose either a single note or entire selected blocks. You can do guitar chord tabs and most of what you might expect for such a program. It's like Microsoft Word for music notation.

I've also grabbed a couple of virtual synthesizers, Tekky Synths' PsYbAsSyX, a new free bass synth for Windows, and Physic Modulation's plug-ins for a synthesizer I don't yet have; Arptron, Meteorite and Pandemonium. Apparently Physic Modulation went out of business and is now giving away its software. Their website is now an archive for the freeware.

Anybody else out there using this kind of software? Got any advice?

Like the other music posts, on Bernard Herrmann, Devil music, and Christmas Metal, this one will probably get updated later with your help.

UPDATE:

I got some advice on software from Bear McCreary by asking, on his blog, what software he used. He uses Sibelius. I assume that means Sibelius 5. It sounds similar to the MagicScore programs as far as function, but I'd assume you'd probably get better sounding instruments to play your music on Sibelius. MagicScore has some really poor MIDI imitations of an electric guitar. Also, the price for Sibelius 5 is about ten times more, $599.00, which is more than I paid for this computer.

Am I that serious? I'm not sure yet. I'll doodle around in my spare time with the MagicScore program for a few weeks more and then see how I feel. Right now it does feel like I've got some creative fire burning in my brain. I feel inspired now but it may not last. I get creative compulsions in every art form from time to time, painting and drawing, story writing... Hell, I've got an unfinished novel I haven't touched in over a month. The fire has to burn pretty hot before I'm willing to put up with the frustrations and the discipline of an art form I haven't taken seriously since just after high school. I used to play in a rock band, but I wasn't that good and my tastes in music are so out-of-the-norm I'm doomed to have a small audience... if any.