Tonight, at the very cool Phoenix FilmBar, was the incredibly successful premiere of the Voyage Trekkers web series, created by the very talented Nathan Blackwell. Tune in for more as Nathan and Squishy Studios release new webisodes over the next several Mondays. Also: become a fan on Facebook so that the new episodes are easy to find. Let’s give some well-deserved appreciation to these guys for making it happen!

I wish I had photos from the recording session for Granted, because it was super awesome and way more interesting to look at than my black and white cover mockup (pictured above) so I’ll try to describe it with words and sounds.

Last Wednesday night, as Phoenix lay quietly powdered with dust from the previous night’s headlining haboob (the dramatic music in this video really amps up the hype… come on guys, it’s just dust), me and eight other cats were anxious waiting, drinking a pregame Dos Equis in the front parking lot of Chaton Studios in Phoenix. A violin player, a clarinet player, a bari sax player, a vib player, a string bass player, a piano player, an engineer, his intern, and I all walk into the studio.

The place is gorgeous, certainly the biggest studio I’ve ever been in (but I haven’t been in many). Dan and Trevor set up microphones as Otto, our chief engineer and owner of Chaton, preps the Protools session. While that’s happening, the chamber group rehearses to the dance of my baton. Behind the bullet-proof glass behind me is the control room, where the directors of the film have just arrived and are anxious to watch the magic of their score come to life in sync with their movie.

It’s been a long process for an independent short film, spanning from principal photography last August to now, but the musicians in front of us seem to sweeten and breath new life (literally) to the project we have gotten to know quite intimately for the last several months. Then the red light turns on — it’s go time.

The most difficult part of the process (one of the very important take-aways from the evening) was the tremendous challenge of directing a group of musicians to an established and robotic click track. Because the music is scored for a film, there are several emotional cues which need to be almost perfectly in sync with the picture at a specific moment. The click track obviously helps us keep time so that these moments can be as close to their visual cues as possible, but as I was quick to learn, this was more difficult than it seemed.

For one, the click track has a number of tempo changes, which makes it easy to throw off the consistency of time that everyone has become accustomed to. The other challenge was that, since I was the only person wearing headphones containing the click mix, either I was listening to the click trying to keep time, or I was listening to the musicians trying to listen for mistakes. Like the pat-your-head, rub-your-belly test, it proved super difficult to do both at the same time for any length of time effectively. Something had to give.

And give it did. And taketh away it also did. But then giveth back again it would sometimes do. We often got off of the click by a beat which was, on the surface, not a terrible thing, but the consequence was that the tempo changes in the tempo track I was listening to were then also off by a beat. So, say, if I had a quick change from quarter note = 86 to 144, we had to stop and start over because now the timing was off.

The solution? Instead of trying to focus on the click or focus on the musicians, I had to, at certain times, not listen to either of them. Eventually, by some black magic, the two would reunite, and after two or three takes, the changes became increasingly more consistent. That is, my conducting got more consistent.

After only two hours, we had captured multiple takes of about 6 minutes of music. Thanks to our amazing musicians and amazing engineers, the session was butter. But don’t take my word for it. Take a listen!

Music from ‘Granted’ (2011)
http://www.michaelmarkowski.com/music/granted/granted-cue1-mix2.mp3

I won’t be working on any new band commissions until the fall, and with Dreamland ready to ship, I have some time this summer to collaborate on some different projects. One project that I’m currently writing some music for is a Star Trek-inspired parody webisode series called Voyage Trekkers. According to Nathan Blackwell, the creator and director of the series, the short 2 - 3 minute episodes will launch in late July, with a new episode every week.

The video above is a little behind-the-scenes teaser, starring leading man (and my leading roommate) Adam Rini as Captain Sunstrike. Enjoy~

Check out the trailer for a new comedy web series some friends created that I’m scoring some music for. Enjoy!

So I spent the last week in Austin, Texas visiting my composer friend, Steven Bryant. Last Wednesday marked the world premiere of his 35-minute magnum opus, Concerto for Wind Ensemble, performed by none-other-than Jerry Junkin and his world class UT musicians.

So what on Earth was I doing in Austin? Well, for the past 10 months, Steven has been making short video documentaries following his creative and composing process for this beefy work. Last Wednesday, the world premiere, was the climax of this series, but of course it would have been a little odd for him to be filming himself while talking to the band. This is where my golden ticket from ASU comes in.

Also on Wednesday’s program was Joel Puckett’s beautiful and emotional new flute concerto, The Shadow of Sirius. But this amazing concert was really only the beginning. On Saturday and Sunday, Jerry Junkin had organized an amazing recording session with an amazing classical musical producer by the name of David Frost. He is the real deal; just look at his creds.

By the way, this wasn’t your ordinary two-track recording. No. In fact, this recording session used a full 32-track count.

Oh yeah. Did I mention it was recorded in surround sound? Both Steven and Joel’s piece (and also John Mackey’s Kingfishers Catch Fire) require some kind of antiphonal playing with performers surrounding the audience. That’s sort of the theme for this album. I’m sure it’ll be several month before we see a final product, but holy cow what a cool experience it was to listen to world class performers conducted by a world class conductor performing world class music recorded by world class engineers. What a week!