Posts tagged: Website
Okay, sorry about that little outage back there. This is what I get for not having my domain registered and hosted in the same place. Must fix that.
Anyhow, with the site running again I thought I’d let everyone know that two short films I recently worked on are preparing to embark on the festival circuit, and I’m very proud to have been a part of both productions — they deserve all the attention and acclaim they can get. I hope to be able to share some more details of when and where you can see them soon.
Meanwhile, I’m happily writing demos, experimenting, and keeping an eye out for gigs down the road as well as working on some neat side-projects so I hope everyone’s summer is going as nicely as mine so far.
After Dante’s Inferno, my gaming life was briefly taken up by Final Fantasy XIII. I say briefly in lieu of the game’s enormous length because I did not survive the full ride. Expect details in my review. Thankfully, I’ve since moved on to something that’s much more fun: Lost Planet 2. Nothing quite like killing massive aliens to keep one’s mind fresh.
Happy Canada Day, everyone!
Important note to everyone: my main domain is temporarily down while I resolve some registration issues. I apologize for the spontaneous downtime and just as frustrated by it, but it is what it is.
Everything should be up and running again within three or five days. My apologies!
Just a quick note to my RSS subscribers: I’ve had to re-make the feed because it wasn’t working properly after the transfer from the old version of the Journal. Now it’s been refreshed, has a new address, and will contain all content from the very beginning as well as properly update all the new content that comes in.
I apologize for the delayed shuffle, but at least it works properly now. In any case, please find the RSS link at the bottom of this page and make sure that’s the feed you’re following as the old one is no longer valid.
And if you don’t already follow me, then by all means subscribe (or Follow, if you’re a Tumblr)!
By the way, what exactly does one call a user of Tumblr? A Tumblr-er? Seems to me like it’s almost built in. “Tumblr”. Hmm.
Back again!
This time with more music and some website news. But first the interesting stuff: this piece is called March of the Death Mage and I think you’ll see why when you hear it. Enjoy the presence of pure orchestral stuff while it lasts because over the next little while I’ll be working primarily with much more modern sounds and synths. But until then:
March of the Death Mage by Mathazzar
Meanwhile, on the website news side of things, I’ve decided that I’d like a place on the internet where I can put my photography and random writing work. Those who know me fairly well will be aware of my other hobbies and I figured that it’s about time I shared more than just my music work lest people start to think I’m a one-dimensional fellow. Besides, learning to prepare and customize your own site is fun!
Assuming I don’t break something, I’ll hopefully have it ready to show you in the near future!
Not too long ago I finished work on a great little short film called I Believe In Mary Black, and since the film is completed and ready to get some screenings around my area, I wanted to put together a selection of the best cues I wrote for it and assemble them into a short EP album. So I did.
The music is dark and rich, with shades of Christopher Young’s similar work for horror scores. I really enjoyed working on the project, so I’m quite proud to show you the results. You can find the album in the Portfolio, or you can listen here:
I Believe In Mary Black (Original Soundtrack) by Mathazzar
If you like what you hear, I’ve added a small Donation button at the bottom of the Contact page, so you’re welcome to drop by any time you have some spare change you’d like to contribute to keeping me up and running. It’s greatly appreciated.
Hi all!
First of all, thanks again for being such diligent listeners. It feels like just the other day I was mentioning how amazing it was that I had already gotten 1,000 plays on SoundCloud, and just now I’ve looked and the number is well over 1,500 now. I’m humbled and overjoyed. And I promise I’ll stop counting now, it just made me excited.
You’ll also notice, by the way, that I’ve brought the live chat box from the main site over here to the Journal as well, so if you’re talking to me and you decide to pop over here, you won’t lose the conversation. Because I care.
Anyway, to celebrate all this good stuff, I’ve put up a brand new track and pushed it to the forefront of my Demo Reel for your listening enjoyment. It’s from a game project I’m helping with and it was a lot of fun to put together, so I hope you enjoy it!
Oh, and if you’re feeling lazy, you can just listen to the new track here:
Gah, what have I done?!
Er, well I’ve basically decided that the easiest way for me to keep the Journal updated and give it a major facelift in the process is by porting it over to Tumblr. So welcome to the new place, make yourselves comfortable.
I had to manually re-publish all the old posts in order to bring them over here properly, so pardon me if your RSS feed accidentally got a bunch of ghost duplicates — that was my mistake, won’t happen again. Now that everything’s up and running (and looking good), I’m hoping to polish up some loose ends and then let the updates start flowing more frequently. Speaking of RSS, you can keep the same feed subscription as always if you’re a subscriber of mine from before — Tumblr’s serving everything to that address, so there’s no need to update anything on your end. I’m nice like that.
Tumblr is lovely and the fact that I can post updates on the go from my iPhone is a nifty and convenient perk of the service. Some Twitter fun still to come on the main site, but in the meantime I just wanted to introduce the new Journal. I’ll do my best to find a way to integrate the two sites a little better…it’ll probably be nothing more fancy than a link headed back to the main site.
For those of you who have asked about the GCFC Match-Up report, I’ll post the final installment back on YC as soon as I can — I’m just waiting on some photos from the recording session and then I’ll write everything up.
Stay classy.
It snowed the other day. I was half expecting this to be another soggy and ugly winter, but it seems that we may yet get a picturesque and cold — an honest and proper — winter, which I’m happy about even though I’m not a huge fan of cold weather.
The Time Traveler premiere was a lot of fun, and the private screening before it went to air was neat too….it’s interesting to meet the actors in person after one has been staring at them on a screen for so many hours. Turns out they actually exist! With TTT finished for now, I’m happily on the lookout for new and interesting projects to work on, and that will hopefully mean some more time for me to do site updates as well now that the wonderful holidays are here and I have some free time (theoretically) to kill.
I’ve been doing pretty frequent SoundCast discussions over at www.tracksounds.com, so you may want to check those out. It’s a great podcast and we discuss many topical issues that would concern fans of film and game scores. Plus, there are always neat contests going on where you can win free scores, and that’s always a good thing.
If something looks different, it’s because I’ve added a live chat function to the site (look up to your right) that you can use to chat with me if I’m around the studio when you’re browsing the site. It’s a neat feature and along with it I’ll also be putting up a new track or two on the Demo Reel, so make sure to take a listen. This is the holiday season though, and in the spirit of…er…madness, I guess, I’ve created a piece that brings together the joys of kazoos, a choir on helium, and a healthy does of my inner Danny Elfman. Enjoy responsibly:
That’s all for now, happy holidays!
After a long and tedious weekend of preparing stems and other such things, I can proudly say that the Time Traveler score is completed! Very exciting to see it all come together and I can’t wait to be able to share some excerpts. For now though, there’s other interesting news on the horizon…
Besides some exciting new projects coming up in the musical world, I also have some fairly significant website tweaks planned, so expect to see those popping up in the fairly-near future. Among them is a live resume (courtesy of the wonderful iPaper plugin from Scribd), which has already made its way to the main navigation menu up there. Unfortunately, the default zoom level can’t be changed for the plugin, so I can’t make it so that you don’t need to scroll to see the whole resume, but it’s a small price to pay for the coolness of having it up and available. I’m hoping to add a link to my business card underneath as well. There’s more coming besides that though, including some cosmetic facelifts (better typography, I choose you!), the long-lost video section of the portfolio, and a pretty big expansion of networking connections and links to all my myriad profiles all over the internet so that people can get and stay in touch with me more conveniently.
To celebrate the completion of the Time Traveler score, I decided that some serious percussion was in order, and so late last night I threw together this little percussive thingy and gave it a title that I feel does an excellent job of encompassing my mindset at that ungodly hour:
Bam bam! Alright, enough of that. I’m off to continue my recent venture into the amazingly complex world of deep synthesis fun, so until next time, adieu, and keep on the lookout for more random site updates as time wears on!
Jazz is fun.
I have discovered this mainly through the listening suggestions of another composer friend of mine, Robin Jessome, whose work with his jazz ensemble Blunt Object I highly encourage everyone to check out. It’s wild. It’s also inspired me to try my hand at some jazz too…if you’re interested in hearing my own entertaining pastiche on the genre, you’ll find a fresh track entitled “Restless” in the Demo Reel section of the Portfolio (or just below, if you’re lazy). I warn you in advance: it contains some unbelievably cheesy scat vocals which may cause involuntary head-shaking and or laughter:
I read a very interesting article the other day which I thought I should mention. Apparently, a team from Northwestern University have found some biological evidence to prove that musicians’ brains are more adept at picking up emotional content in sounds — musical or, in this case, speech. When you sit and think about it, I suppose it makes a lot of sense, since musicians tend to train themselves to identify precise variations in pitch and timbre and so on, but I hadn’t actually thought about the significance that training might have on applications outside of music. Anyway, I won’t paraphrase the whole article, but suffice it to say that I was intrigued and I think it’s well worth looking over for those who are musically inclined: http://www.physorg.com/news155309993.html.
I am happy to report that I have a number of awesome projects coming up, one of which actually involves the Blunt Object ensemble I mentioned above. All very exciting. I will also say that I hope to continue coaxing my website frogs to polish up the remaining missing elements of the site — the video section of the Portfolio page, the stylesheet for this Journal, etc.
It’s coming, not to worry. In the meantime, take a listen to my foray into the jazz world, subscribe to the RSS feed if you haven’t already, check out that article, and please send me chocolates. Anything but mint or fruit. Nuts are fine.
…What? It’s worth a shot.
