A New Journey

[C J Pro]

A New Journey (Click here to Listen)

For those who don't know of my own tradition, I try to write an original piece of music every holiday season. They are always written for orchestra, meant to be playable, and use only Garritan samples. Previous works of mine from this tradition have found their ways onto the Annual Garritan Community Christmas CDs (Celebration of Life and Christmas Festival Overture). For the 2010 year, I am pleased to introduce another piece of music entitled "A New Journey."

At the conclusion of the year, celebration breaks out across the world. Some may celebrate happiness, others may celebrate togetherness, and others may celebrate a combination of both or another idea. During many of these celebrations, one will reflect on life and start deciding how they want to shape their future. And as the celebrations come to a conclusion, many embark on new journeys so as to reach a brighter future.

For those curious about what was used to write the piece, here are some of the details. The original theme was created in Sibelius 6 on a laptop (easy way of writing something down while on the go). The theme was then completely rewritten in Pro Tools on my desktop system so as to become more complex and detailed. I was using Pro Tools M-Powered 8 at the beginning of the project back in September and am currently using Pro Tools 9 for the conclusion of the project. All of the samples were from Personal Orchestra except for the drum kit which is from Concert and Marching Band and the Piano which is from Jazz and Big Band. I had not made the switch to ARIA by the time I created the project, so the entire thing was completed with Kontakt 2 (and thus may become my last piece to use Kontakt this extensively ).

Click Here to Listen

[FLWrd]

Nice tune. Very upbeat, indeed. It has a bit of a 70s/80s West Coast feel (if I'm correct). You've got a nice way of layering, which keeps the song moving forward. The only thing I'd change is t give the accompanying instruments a bit more volume. Thanks for sharing.

PS first I was confused by the place of the link in your post: it looks like the title instead of a link, and then I had to reload your website twice before it started. If other people experience the same: click on the centered title, and if it doesn't load quickly, hit reload, perhaps a few times. Worked for me...

[C J Pro]

Thank you for pointing that out, FLWrd. I fixed the link on my post (and now have a link at both the top and the bottom). I also went to the page and set it to start automatically. I usually leave autostart off as I sometimes put more than one audio file on a single page.

To explain a little bit more about the creation of the piece:

I actually wasn't going for the west coast feel. When I created the original theme, I was sitting in my friend's apartment (well, girlfriend now ) and wanted to write a Christmas piece. As I had been surrounded by Disney music thanks to my current position at Walt Disney World, a particular song called Fantasy (part of the soundtrack for the Share a Dream Come True parade that used to run at Magic Kingdom) came to mind. In particular, I enjoyed the trading of lead parts between brass and the rest of the orchestra, which became the basis of the french horn and strings trading the lead toward the beginning of A New Journey. The theme was written for piano and as a very basic piano line and then placed into Pro Tools later that night. I added onto the piano line a good bit to build full chords and added on a drum kit just to test it out, which then created this recording.

The piece expanded over time and at a point I got stuck at figuring out a way to expand it and eventually end it. The inspiration for this came from two separate areas. First, a fellow musician told me that he much preferred high-energy Christmas pieces over the slower and grander. I immediately went back to Christmas Festival Overture and toyed around with the pattern in the high woodwind parts, which thus evolved into the piano and string lines during the second half of A New Journey. Secondly, I worked a shift controlling crowds during the parade at the Magic Kingdom. The modern sound of the Celebrate a Dream Come True parade that I worked during ended up further influencing the way I balanced and layered the instruments for this second half. At one point, I was even throwing around the idea of writing the remainder of the piece in the style of a Magic Kingdom parade song, but decided I was already too limited on time to do that.

I've done the layering technique before on a larger, but somewhat more subtle scale, in a piece called Above The Battle. I've been developing the technique for several years and and always like when a simple, modest sound can become large and complex while retaining it's original idea. Meanwhile, the balance in many of my pieces tends to push the melody a tad bit more as I mix on headphones and am always worried about the bass and accompanying instruments from becoming too overwhelming. For those who are curious, I use a pair of Sony MDR-7506 headphones.

So in short, the piece is actually inspired by Disney music thanks to me being surrounded by it on a daily basis. The layering technique is something I use often but try to hide as it seems to be the easy-way-out. And the balance is due to me not mixing in a proper environment (dorm rooms and apartments are not good for mixing in but I don't have much choice at this point).

Finally, for a little bit of fun, I have all of the renderings of the piece from when I first put it into Pro Tools to the final recording online. You can listen to them with the links below:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

And before anybody asks about recording number 7: I was bored that night.

[etLux]

Excellent job on this, Colton!

Lively, well put together -- and just a plain good listen.

All my best,



David
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David Sosnowski
www.DavidSosnowski.com

[trentpmcd]

Nice, optimistic sounding Christmas music. I enjoyed listening.