Programmer by Day...
Musician By Night...Welcome to the website of Brett McCoy
Enter freely of your own will and leave behind some of the happiness you bring
Latest News
Happy New Year!
Published: 2 January 2010, 2:01 pmThe New Year is bringing with it many good things!
First of all, I acquired two excellent EastWest/Quantum Leap sample libraries:
- Masters of the Silk Road, a wonderful library of Eastern instruments from Persia, India and China.
- RA, a more eclectic collection of "world" instruments from around the globe. A nice complement to the Silk collection.
Oh yeah, also got Symphonic Orchestra from EWQL!
I had been using the libraries from IK Multimedia, especially Miroslav Philharmonik, but the EWQL definitely sound better, and they are 64-bit. I will admit that the SampleTank engine from IKM is more flexible in terms of what you can control with continuous controller (more customizable/programmable), but hopefully the upcoming PLAY Pro from EWQL will put it over the top.
A bit of good fortune also regarding continuing education -- a family member who died a while back had left a scholarship in place for family members to use. So I have enrolled in Berklee College's Master Certificate Program in Orchestration for Film and TV. I am starting my first class on Jan 11 -- arranging for rhythm sections (guitar, bass, drums, keys). This should be a breeze, I hope.
Also am diving into using Lilypond as my primary scoring tool. It's similar to LaTeX in that it uses text markup that gets built into a PostScript or PDF rendering of the score. It's amazingly flexible, and all you need is a text editor (emacs) and Lilypond (which is 100% free software) and of course runs on Linux. I have been developing some Perl scripts and templates to generate scores for full orchestra and for a 4 or 5 piece rhythm section. The scripts don't generate the notes, just build up the score, setting a few parameters and inserting a set number of empty measures where notes can be added.
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ePipes
Published: 14 November 2009, 8:31 pmFrom a friend's post on Facebook, I discovered a nice little plugin called 'ePipes' -- or more accurately, The Fred Morrison Sound. It's a sample-based VST plugin that provides four different bagpipe sounds -- Border pipes, small pipes, Highland pipes and Uilleann pipes. I obtained a trial copy yesterday and played around with it a little bit, it sounds pretty good, and has built-in reverb, too. It's really designed to be used with a bagpipe MIDI controller, like Technopipes from Fagerstrom. I haven't gotten those yet, but plan to someday....
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CSMC Secretary and new studio
Published: 28 October 2009, 9:55 pmI recently became the new Secretary for the Composers' Society of Montgomery County. Basically, this means I take meeting minutes at the quarterly meetings. I am adding new duties, though, to my role -- maintaining the member email list (via the Electric Minstrel mail server) and publishing a quarterly newsletter.
In other news, I recently transplanted my studio from the dusty basement to an upstairs room, it will be much more conducive to art and music.
Pics of the new studio
Some new musical prospects are developing as well but won't remark any further until they become more solidified.[ Read Comments ]
Composers' Society
Published: 7 October 2009, 8:57 pmI joined the Composers' Society of Montgomery County last year around this time (not too long after my dad died). I feel bad I haven't been more active with the group, I went to one party and met everyone and haven't done a darn thing since. Of course, since I joined I did two semesters of orchestration with Berklee College, started up a new band (Blue Hotel), released the Alhazred CD and wrote a couple of short film scores, so haven't exactly been slacking. I have a potential new thing coming up soon but won't say more about it until I know more about it.
I just wish I could turn all of this musical activity into *income* :-)
The October meeting for CSMC is this Saturday, I am really looking forward to it. There has been talk of a 'Composing Camp', there was one meeting about it (which I missed because I stupidly forgot about it). It could be something interesting and fun![ Read Comments ]
Tales from the Perilous Quill
Published: 6 October 2009, 9:12 amSince I am going to be focusing on music only here, I have started a new blog that focuses on art, animation and writing --> Tales from the Perilous Quill. This will be the 'companion' blog for my website, Chapel Perilous, which is also the name of my studio... but I do more than just record music in Chapel Perilous, I also draw, paint, animate and write in there as well.
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