Right on schedule, Squishy Studios released yet another new webisode for Voyage Trekkers this morning, as they have for the last four Mondays, and as they will continue to do for at least the next five Mondays. If you haven’t watched them yet, check out episodes 3 and 4 below (don’t worry, they are so well-crafted that you don’t need to necessarily watch them in sequence).

Of course, I share these here because I have been lucky to write a bit of music for each episode, including the series’s theme, a wonderful rip-off/reinvention of the Star Trek theme. It’s been a tremendous amount of fun, mostly because I think of the series as a live-action cartoony comic book. That is, the characters are so comical that my quirky orchestration style, Star-Trek-meets-1950s-Western-serials, doesn’t seem too out of place in the Voyage Trekkers universe.

I’m also lucky to basically have free range over the music I write, aside from a few well-pointed director’s notes. Of course, Nathan, the show’s director and creator, does the final audio/music mix, so if something I wrote isn’t totally working, he has the tools to splice, dice, and replice [replace] the music with another track written for perhaps another episode.

Since every episode now has a specific deadline for release, there’s not a lot of time for second-guessing or music rewrites, considering the other aspects of post-production that must also get done. Basically, Nathan emails me a locked cut of an episode somewhere between the hours of midnight and one in the morning usually about a week before the release, and I try to have a complete score to him, in his inbox, by the time he wakes up some six or seven hours later. The process is a busy one, but one that I enjoy for the sheer fact that I don’t have to stress out by overanalyzing what I’ve written. Once it’s finished, aside from — maybe — a few small tweaks, the score ships! That is, it’s out of my hands and into Nathan’s.

In comparison, when I have a lot of time for a wind band commission, I often get to a point near the end where I have just enough time before a deadline to sit down with a red pen and criticize my own work. I usually end up digging myself into holes by rewriting or reorchestrating certain sections that my gut said I should have just left alone. I suppose in this respect, deadlines can be a gift.

The members of Bully Mammoth Sketch Comedy: Ryan (left), Chris, Ricky, and Adam

For the last few years, I have been tech-ing for some of the funniest guys I know, collectively known as Bully Mammoth. It’s no coincidence that two out of the four guys in the photo above are my roommates and best friends. I have been in plays and musicals with Ryan (far left) since junior high and have recently found a passion for running things behind-the-scenes.

Good News, Grandma!

Their comedy is 95% scripted (”sketch” comedy), with a 5% margin for on-the-spot improvised punch-ups. And despite that their subject matter may not exactly be “family friendly” (whatever that means), you can’t help but care about their characters and the unique situations they find themselves in.

Good News, Grandma!

Take, for instance, the sketch Good News, Grandma!, where the boys in brown pay tribute to those late-night sexy hotlines with their own reinvention: a hotline for grandmas where they can “chat with nice young men of all walks of life just waiting to tell you pleasant news to make [their] day.”

Bully Mammoth on the terrace of the Tempe Center for the Arts

Last night marked Bully Mammoth’s biggest show yet at Tempe’s beautiful Tempe Center for the Arts. While the boys are never above playing smaller, more intimate spaces like the wonderfully adventurous space at Space 55, they could only describe their groundbreaking show at TCA as Arizona’s Carnegie Hall. While their live shows are truly Mammoth’s main event, they do sport a humble online video presence. One of their most recent is a music video called Pee Pee Drips (On My Kicks), and while ***it is probably not very appropriate for young people***, I guarantee that every guy can probably relate to it. (Plus, I wrote the music.) Enjoy!

Episode 2: Social Network. Tune in for more at Squishy Studios!

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