highschool brassband

[kensuguro]

Doing some exploration for a new project I'm working on for different interpretations of "nostalgia", ranging from 8bit stuff and beyond. Here's a TV opening title-esque track in the tradition of all the other retro TV opening-esque tracks I've done in the past. I'm still not sure what the exact genre or style of it is, but it just reminds me of an opening to.. don't even know exactly what show. The arrangement does remind me of brass band / band music I did in middle school and high school. It's just a style exploration and I didn't put in the woodwinds yet so you'll find some "blank" spots where there's no melody.

Ken's world famous EWI brass band featuring Synful magic orchestra.
2 trumpet, 2 tnr trombones, 1 bass trombone
violin, viola, and cello sect
pianoteq EP
bass is just some synth patch I threw together
sampletank 2xl drums

mixed to 3 buses and mixed to master with Sonimus Satson.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, playing brass on EWI is the SHIIITTT!!!

[dante]

Stylistically - it reminds me of the theme to 'The Greatest American Hero' - Believe it or Not ! Which was also used in an epidoes of Seinfeld (to hilarious effect) as the outgoing message on George Costanza's answering machine.

[dawman]

I think it's great stuff.
Your wide variety of style is most impressive.
Synful Strings should use your chops for a demo, sounds more realistic than their FX bathed demos that I remember.

Thanks

[kensuguro]

lol, just checked out believe it or not intro. Yup, that's the type.

Thanks Jimmy. The old TV thing's been a recurring theme for me. The vintage video filter/plugin thing I did in mod2 was one of my old TV related projects as well. I wished I could recreate that in VST. It's not horribly complicated, there's just no quick alternative to whip something like that together in VST. (that's exportable as a redistributable VST) Might have a go with Synthmaker at some point since I have a license.

This style, or music from this era is tough to arrange for. There's brass, woodwinds, strings, sometimes a big percussion section.. it's pretty much like arranging for an orchestra + a band stuck on top of it. Lots of moving parts, tho many times the "orchesra" is sort of simplified to just violin+viola and trumpet+trombones and maybe a horn. Actually resembles a scaled up broadway pit orchestra. Still, lots of parts tho. Way more than drums+bass+keys+ornamental "other shit" sort of an arrangement.

Ya, I've given a bunch of my stuff to the Synful guy, but I guess he needs to update the website manually, so putting up new demos is a bit of drag. And it looks like he's got a bunch of great demos from symphonic people. Sadly I'm a nobody compared to those guys. Garritan seemed to have liked my stuff back in the Garritan Person Orchestra v1 days (had a demo up for some time), so I guess that's some validation eh.

I do like Synful tho, and hope it'll get an update one of these days. I can't really imagine writing strings with anything else at this point, but wish the sound was better fidelity. I'm still amazed more people don't use Synful. (or more accurately "why no one uses Synful") I feel like I've found the goose that lays golden eggs, and nobody else wants it.

[dante]

Dont bother with a VST coz they've already done it natively as a Reason Rack extension:

audiomatic

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Since it has Japanese written on it, I wonder where they stole the idea

As for strings, I'm using Euphonic Strings refill coz its the first affordable ( < $100 ) 24 bit string emsemble sample set. The others are all 16 bit castoffs from Sydlavic, EWQL etc etc. Check it out coz the fidelity is there, even for my ancient ears

Euphonic

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As for your comical VHS demo, well its still being listened to some of these registered as recently as last month - a coupla guys played it 5 times :

vhs soundcloud hits

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[kensuguro]

haha, forgot you put it on soundcloud.