~ Herbie Hancock

Read the whole interview here .

This is a song that I composed about a year ago. I was actually working on setting up a film scoring template when this song  was given to me. It is one of my favorites. It meshes the sound of a “Chamber Orchestra” with a few modern twists and turns. Enjoy!

Tipharah – A Hebrew word meaning Glory, beautiful.

This is a song from my album “The Glory Sound”. This is one of my personal favorites from that project. When I was writing it I did not particularly feel too great about it. But once it was finished I was very pleased with the results. I realized that I really don’t have to ”feel” inspired for the grace of God on my life for songwriting to operate. Inspiration is not really a feeling, although many people probably think otherwise because of how they feel when they are inspired. 

To my fellow musicians;

If you just free yourself from the bondage of always having to “feel” your music, you open up a world of limitless creativity. ~Donnie

The project also features a free flow of spontaneous, improvisational solo piano.
You can order the CD now for $13.95 US (shipping and handling included)
Shipping is currently limited to the US for physical CD’s.

http://www.donniethomas.com/store/

Well as I am sure you know, my 2nd album “Effervescent” got pushed back. We are still expecting a release before the summer is over however. So be looking out for it.

I love you guys!

Thank you so much for your prayers and support!

~Donnie

Now even when listening to the soundtrack apart from the film, I thoroughly enjoy the experience. As a matter of fact that is the perfect word to describe the soundtrack; “an experience”. That is exactly what Avatar is. It is not merely a film, but an in-depth almost interactive experience and the music is inexplicably tied to it, a lot like the alien world in the movie is connected to it’s inhabitants.

I have multiple out of copyright ebooks  in my collection from the Harvard School of Music.  Now you may be asking why is any of this is useful.  Well, think of it this way. Music is one of the few subjects in which the teaching methods have not changed much in the last 100 years.  Orchestration and Composition have made the most advancements with additional instruments being added to the modern orchestra, and orchestration techniques being augmented by digital media composition (midi, etc).  However the underlying principles of musical tonality, harmonic analysis, timbre, good counterpoint and musician technique are still very much the same. So a book on musical composition from say 1907 is actually quite useful if you can stomach the funny dialect that was often used back then. The same rule applies to sheet music.

But don’t take my word for it. Go check it out yourself be sure to check out the music books from the Harvard Library, and if anyone asks you , you can tell them that you got your musical education from Harvard.  :-)

P.S.

I was obviously joking about that last part.

~

Donnie

So if you have been waiting to upgrade to the latest version of Cubase, I think now may be a good time to do it.  Since last week, Steinberg has been offering free 30 day trial of Cubase 5 for those wanting to test the waters before making the leap. I highly recommend you check it out.

http://www.steinberg.net

No Samples

First of all the shocking thing about this plugin is that it uses absolutely no samples to generate it’s magnificent sound. The technology is based entirely upon physical modeling. This makes the load time extremely fast. It also has very little memory footprint and takes up very few processor cycles. Unless of course you are still using a Pentium III Celeron processor based workstation. Hopefully no one is that behind the curve. Secondly, the physical modeling takes away the need for velocity based switching of samples, which can sometimes cause  a less fluid feeling when playing the instrument.

A True Instrument

The bottom line about this plugin is that it really has the responsiveness of an instrument. That is something that is taken for granted nowadays. Many composers and producers simply edit the heck out of there midi recordings to get a realistic sound from there performances. In this age of  multiple gigabyte sample libraries , true expression has often been made a low priority. Being a professional musician, I always look for plugins that just feel “right” when I sit down at my keyboard to play. Maybe that’s asking too much of say a horn library or something, but an electric piano emulation ought to be playable.  Anyway, that’s enough ranting for now.  Here is a short demo I created using nothing but Lounge Lizard and a little reverb.