Tuesday, February 11 8:30 a.m. A huge amount of time has passed since my last journal entry. This delay is pretty typical of the ending stretch in a project: the work starts to pile up as everyone involved realizes that they’re much too close to the kill date for comfort. In my case, I was…
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Sunday, January 26 Today is a red-letter day in the project. In 7.5 hours I completed song no. 10: “There’ll Be Sad Songs” by Billy Ocean. My tenth song was supposed to be “Mná Na h’Éirann” by Sharon Corr, but I moved up that add-on song I was given a few days ago. I’m sure…
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Saturday, 25 January 7:30 p.m. It’s been a sluggish couple of days, but not without results. I started scoring Mel C’s version of “Both Sides Now” yesterday and finished it today. I don’t know if anything I ever do is perfect, but this score was as close to perfection as I’ve gotten so far, at…
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Thursday, 16 January 9:42 p.m. after a long day. It’s good to get back to this journal after a few days off, somewhat enforced. After leaving Collingwood, I dropped in on a composer friend of mine who lived not too far from there, around the Tasman Bay area where the weather was a bit nicer.…
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Thursday, 9 January It’s 4:20 a.m. as I start this journal entry. Usually around this time of the morning, I like to be starting my workday. But in fact I’ve just finished up a song. It’s all due to the previously mentioned logistics forced upon my schedule by vacationing in this place. This morning, I…
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Tuesday, 7 January, Part 2 After re-scoring the Keating yesterday, I sent the whole thing along with the Tubular Bells score to my MD, and got a good response back. That’s what matters, really. A thumbs-up at this point in my career is more about the relief of saving me from rewrites than it is…
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Tuesday, 7 January, Part 1 I’ve been slack about my journal for the past two days, and finally catching up today. Well, I did finish the Ronan Keating song “When You Say Nothing At All” in one day on Sunday the 5th, but strangely it was a lot more of an effort than the awesome…
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Saturday, 4 January 2013 A very exciting day. It’s hard to complain about a day that starts good, flows well, and ends great. Today I decided to orchestrate Tubular Bells, and I made it all the way through 128 bars and 3.5 minutes. I was helped enormously in this by the semi-orchestral nature of the…
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Friday, 3 January 2013 – Collingwood, New Zealand Day 1 of work on the Mission Estate orchestration job. It’s good to be back to it again, though the circumstances are a little strange. It’s 4:50pm as I start this journal entry, leaning back from my little workdesk in a little cabin on the South Island…
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