Yesterday (6/2) I bounced pdfs & bundled up draft deliverables for this choral engraving project I had (client in the UK has been making this huge progressive metal album for years, just slowly hiring musicians and mix engineers/artists to record and build the album from the ground up from their midi compositions. Blake Richardson from BtBaM did drums, for example, just to be a little #namedropping so-and-so. ANYWAY, I have been prepping/engraving choir parts from the demos so that the lab choir they are hiring to record live vox will hopefully have a decently efficient time in the studio reading music that has cues and timestamps and reasonable divisi and all that.)
When that was done, I took a half day mentally and worked on some house projects in and outside, and took the dog to the vet, which is why this post is a day late in the week. Whew, okay, long walk for a short drink explaining that. To business:
This Week
Sunkeeper - draft deliverables- More Sunkeeper - Lyrics, cover sheet/composer style sheet with general performance notes for the ensemble, any revisions from client.
- Lesson Planning & Teaching - Tuesday & Wednesday
- Marketing/Self Promo - send out June email to mailing list with update on new transcriptions & heads up about upcoming streaming/lesson videos/etc.
- Main Video Editing - VOLA - We Will Not Disband. Also cut a collaborative post with clips from the drummer.
- Mix Feedback - VOLA - find a balance between how I mixed the solo piano and the effects the drummer added they sent me.
- Secondary Video Editing - Phone quick projects - Pictures at an Exhibition (5 seconds of each movement lol), Rehearsal Prep clip with Biedenbender recording & sheet music.
- Transcription Work - Synestia/Disembodied Tyrant string parts.
- Filming - couple string clips. Starting teaching at a studio in Columbus starting in a couple weeks, so with that in mind I want my channels to occasionally include some string content as I jump back into that pedagogical world, don't want my presence to just be piano if I also have string students.
- Vinyl organization - I have some catching up/labelling to do of vinyl that has arrived (also been pulling and listing some stuff on discogs if anyone else is hunting anything right now).
Realtor Editing - color corrected and did layout for a short talking head video from that client, new type of content they're making. Now that there's a baseline edit, got about a batch of 20 of these vids that I need to copy paste the template onto and clean up the audio for.
Tech - Working on setting up laptop for streaming. I'll make a whole separate post at some point of the circles I've gone in over the years to get audio broken out of Pro Tools over to OBS - the video part of setting up to stream is ezpz, any form of complexity of audio routing is a nightmare, at least on PC (there's no easy equivalent to Loopback for pc/windows). I honestly expect this to be much easier to set up on my macbook, and then I can teach & stream from the actual piano in the living room instead of the keyboard at my desk.
Gear/Hardware Research - Was planning on building a NAS server this summer but I think I'm going to kick the can down the road another couple years when I can budget more for it, there's a 22tb desktop drive on sale I've been getting targeted ads for the past couple weeks that the $/tb makes this a super reasonable stopgap. Just with how much filming & recording 2025 has had, my normal storage drives are filling up alarmingly quickly, just need something I can offload a couple tb to every couple months of projects I don't need consistent access to anymore. Also need an additional cheap speaker amp & to look into if this arylic LP10 is getting any good reviews as a way to get a couple 'dumb' stereos to be cast-able over wifi because bluetooth still suuuuucks in 2025. RIP my $35 chromecast audio pucks from like 2012, why is the cheapest option now 150 (wiim pro, I'm not in apple ecosystem so I can't use cheaper airplay models whomp whomp).
(I leave off the things that to me are obvious, like practicing piano or emailing/scheduling with people, that's sort of a given for every day)
Feel free to let me know what you're working on. When I was streaming for a while on twitch last year before tour, I did it as a method of accountability for myself (have to work on building the patches for the set or practicing the songs while streaming), and really enjoyed having that outlet of parallel working with other folks. So, if having an accountabilibuddy and jotting down your workflow for the week would benefit you as well, hop on!
Top comments (7)
That IS a cool name drop!!
Also, what is choral engraving?
Also, to what extent do you allow AI to make your life easier?
So engraving is just sort of the more 'professional' presentation of sheet music. Like transcription is the act of writing out some music, but it doesn't indicate any sort of standard - lawd knows I've got tons of shorthand transcriptions I've done by hand that just serve to remind me what to play, but might not be super helpful if someone else were to try and sight read it. Left over term from when they had to engrave/chisel sheet music into metal plates for block printing.
In this case, since the choir will only be punching in specific sections of long meandering prog songs, I need to not just A.) write out the parts and set up divisi and voice leading that is manageable and readable by a halfway decent choir with not much rehearsal time, but also B.) need to include enough cues and time stamps so that when they jump around from spot to spot when recording, they can quickly figure out what to listen for to grab their pitches and not get lost in the sauce.
(trying out an embed, pardon me if this doesn't work I am an absolute baby, not used to working in such feature rich platforms).
hopefully this shows timestamp, sort of aggregate cues before the voices enter, then the layering of the voices (SATB with splits for S1 and S2, B1 and B2). Still need to go through and add lyrics, phrase markings, and breaths. Also want to make all the cue staves smaller so it's more obvious which are the Actual Choir Partsâ„¢ vs the cues.
Ahh, okay! Thanks for explaining. Sounds pretty tedious but potentially satisfying!
Meta-note: if you uploaded to Imgur solely for the purpose of uploading here, you did too much work. The direct image upload functionality looks and works better!
@pat_mccusker do you remember our between the buried and me listening sessions back in the day? 🥹
Colors will forever hold a special place in my heart!!
But did Colors II live up to the hype? I've got a couple friends that were super happy with it and a couple that were more lukewarm in their reception.
I admittedly never gave Colors II a listen but have heard similar so so feelings about it… Maybe it’s time I finally check it out!