Travis Conrad

So I started working on my elegy composition and I’ve been exploring a lot of different avenues. It has to be well composed, fluent throughout and above all, beautiful. While experimenting on the piano I stumbled upon a melody containing only five different notes, and it was just the ticket. Just the sound I’d been looking for. And it occurred to me, why not make the entire opening using a pentatonic scale?
And so I did.

This is the opening ten bars, it really sets the mood for the whole composition. And I have to say it, I really love the harp as an instrument. It’s perfect in so many ways. I could listen to harp music all day, and I’m sure one day I’ll make a playlist full of it and do just that. So yea, this is the pentatonic harp opening. So lush, I’m very happy with it.

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Off to see the Last 5 Years at the Grand tonight. Word on the street is it’s pretty good. I’m fond of Jason Robert Brown’s work for the most part. What I’ve seen of 13 I wasn’t too crazy about but I never really gave it an honest chance. But the Last 5 Years…. so good.

-Travis Conrad

P.S. Tip of the day: Don’t put zuccini… zuccini? zuchini? zucchini? zucchini….. don’t put it in soup. Adds little taste and ends up looking like pickles. #gag

So, totally doing this score for my friend’s short 5 minute film.
Gonna have it done for tomorrow.
Love working under pressure and deadlines, and no, that’s not sarcasm.
I’ve come up with a stupid amount of music ideas, it’s actually ridiculous.

Sidenote: I NEED to get Garageband, it’s not even a question of want anymore. Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze.

Sidenote: Totally loving being a vegetarian (still have fish and rarely chicken/turkey. RARELY.) Omnomnom feel fantastic, tofu is my new best friend.

I’ll post the score soon, you’ll like it, I prom.

-Travis Conrad

*****UPDATE*****
Here’s the opening for the short film. The film is called Erin.
We wanted to keep the score simple, so I stuck with piano and strings for the majority. ‘Melancholy made Beautiful’ was the theme to reflect the film. Check it out, let me know what you think.

The Beautiful Mean – Opening

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Motif for a Letter I – Charlie receives the first letter from Erin.

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Motif for a Letter II – Charlie and Erin’s correspondence / Erin stands him up.

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Motif for a Letter III – Conclusion

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So lots of exciting stuff has been happening. Between my job going awesomely, the excitement of designing the set for Western’s Big Purple Couch, having my friend’s string quartet learn my rendition of O Canada, running a D&D campaign with some friends and finally recruiting some singers to help me make some demos for Dysfunction, I’ve had next to zero down-time.

Unfortunately, the aformentioned events offer nothing to share on my blog (yet!!), but give it a month and I’ll have real updates about stuff! Big stuff! Cool stuff! Stuff that will make not hate my blog so much! Haha, so as a peace offering, I’m giving you a sneak listen of this version of my Festival Waltz that I’ve been working on. I wanted to give it a latin/blues feel, so it’s got some sax, marimba, pizzicato, bass, lil bit of steel drum. It’s different. Darcy (@darcypatrick on twitter) is trying to convince me to arrange it for string quartet, but we’ll see.

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Hope everyone’s summers are going as great as mine.

-Travis Conrad

Yesterday I was trying to convert some new songs I have been working on from .midi form (which I do my notations in) into .mp3 files, but the site I normally use (HamieNET) was down.

I was not impressed.

And as is usually the case in these situations I promptly looked for alternative free routes.

And that lead me to the Direct MIDI to MP3 Converter. It may not be free but it’s got a great 30 day trial which I’m VERY pleased with. It comes with it’s own soundfont and makes adding new soundfonts incredibly simple. The sound is crisp and clear which is a huge step forward; HamieNET’s conversions (as I’m sure you heard) tended to get scratchy. Not these. And it lets you control the reverb and adjust individual track volumes as you’re about to convert your files which is just fugging awesome. Needless to say I’m very impressed. It may not be garageband but it’s the best I have to work with right now and it’s a hell of a lot better than what I was using.

So in light of the new renderings at my disposal, I thought I’d share some of my older, pre-Dysfunction stuff here on the ol’ blog. It’s all classical/instrumental shit stuff, so I hope you like it, let me know what you think.

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This one’s aptly named ‘Orchestration 4′. Really got the creative juices flowing on that title. This was the first time I ever really toyed around with percussion instruments, as well as weaving motifs throughout a song. SO MUCH fun to write. It’s for strings, harp, glocksenspiel and numerous percussions, along with the occasional orchestra hit.

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This second one is called ‘To London’. It’s a piece I was writing in dedication to my city (here in Ontario, not the one cross the pond). It’s got a bit of a jazzy feel, I was aiming for something kinda urban although I think I failed at that. I worked on it for a couple days then got bored so it’s not even close to being finished. It’s for full orchestra.

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This final one here was a string quartet piece I was working on called ‘Orsus’, being Latin for ‘a beginning, undertaking, or initiative’. I thought of it as one of the first more serious pieces I worked on, and so ‘a beginning’ referred to the beginning of the wonderful things I would write (roflmao, talk about delusions). It’s very slow and not even CLOSE to being done, but this new rendering sounded amazing compared to the old version so I might just be inspired enough to work on it again.

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On a side note, I rearranged my room last night!!!111!!1!1!! I know you’re as excited as I am. There’s something about newly rearranged rooms that inflicts me with such joy. It’s a sickness really… and it runs in my family. My mom didn’t work on Fridays when I was younger and so more often then not, we’d come home from school and the living room would be turned around or the computer would be in the basement or somehow the couch found it’s way onto the back patio. -sigh- Goooooooooodtimes.

-Travis Conrad

Happy birthday Canada!

In honour of Canada’s 142nd birthday, I arranged O Canada for string quartet. I like to think of it as a birthday present to our great country. The idea came to me out of the blue on my way home from work and it was more or less fully formed upon arrival. Over the last couple days I’ve been getting it all down before it gets forgotten, or worse, tarnished in memory. My good friend Darcy Blinch and his string quartet will hopefully help me make a recording of this for me to share, in the mean time you’ll have to settle for the computer generated version. If anyone is interested in the sheet music just send me a heads up at travis at travisconrad dot com.

Enjoy your Canada Day everyone (and hopefully my arrangement :D ).

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-Travis Conrad

PS Guess who got Twitter! Some bastard took TravisConrad so I had to settle for TravisOfConrad. It’s the best name that was still available, trust me.

Before tossing up the latest Dysfunction song to your collective, judging, unworthy ears, it’s important to understand the scenario surrounding the song.

1. It’s sung by a girl, Charlotte. Relatively quiet, passive, scholarly Charlotte.
2. She’s just been asked on out a real date from a guy, Cameron, whom she’s met twice now: once in his office, once at a business meeting over dinner.
3. She doesn’t have a wide account of experience in the world of dating. And nearly not as much as, say, Kim (in fact I doubt there are many people alive that have as much experience as Kim, porn stars omitted).
4. This is song takes place in her head. It’s an internal debate.

Below the song I’ve posted the first couple lines so you can read along with the synth vocal notes if you like (also will help give you an idea of the rhyme scheme). The lyrics are broken up into syl-ab-les to aid in following the vocals correctly if’n you so choose. I’d include all the lyrics but I really don’t want to give it all away like your girlfriend on the first date OH BURN!

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Damn-it Came-ron why would you,
ask me that,
for-cing me to pick an an-swer, when there are few op-tions on de-mand.

Things were go-ing pret-ty well.
Now this chat
has gone to hell. It’s a can-cer when you can’t dwell on the stakes at hand.

Peo-ple can’t leave things a-lone,
when they’re fine.
If I had known this was com-ing, I’d have post-poned walk-ing home with him.

But it’s too late to go back,
so de-cline,
or stay on track with this hum-ming train down tar-mac. Both op-tions seem dim.

On the one hand we have yes.
Rush-ing in’s
not bad I guess if you’re cau-tious and you a-ssess the sit-u-a-tion.

On the o-ther we have no.
It be-gins,
when I say so, and this nau-seous feel-ing is grow- ing. I want to run.

</lyrics>
<continue reading without lyrics for the remaining 55 seconds of the song :] >

I know what you’re about to say. “But Travis, that last chord sounds all wrong. What kind of second rate Vaudeville composer are you?” Fear not! There is reason. That chord was Charlotte’s clarity. She’s made her decision, her thoughts are clear. That final chord is meant to up-lift and remove the gloom and disorder that’s been building up over the course of the song. It ushers the way into the song following immediately after. hu-ZAH!

Next up I am pleased to announce a new, much more realistic rendering of the Festal Waltz that I posted just over a month ago. I convert it from midi to mp3 using a site called HamieNET. It gets the job done but it’s certainly nothing near commercial quality. Using a friend’s copy of Garageband, I converted my sheet music to mp3 once again. The results are unparalleled. UN-FREAKING-PARALELLED. It’s fantastic, I’m so pleased. I can’t wait to acquire my own mac so I’ll have this incredibly tool at my disposal 24/7/365/152 (I think 152 more years is pretty reasonable when you take into consideration the advances that are going on with stem cell research).

Feast upon the new and improved rendition. I cannot wait til I’m in a position to hear it being played for realsies.

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*note: the celesta’s been replaced by a glockenspiel as was the original intention. I apologize for any sleep you might lose/any grief this decision has caused you.

*also note: just a reminder that all mp3 files and images are on this website are Copyright © 2008-2009 Travis Conrad Reichstein

-Travis Conrad PEACIN’ OUT!

Some days I wake up with an idea for a song in my head. Literally, these things come to me in my dreams. A couple days ago this came to me, and so I started working on it before it left my mind as ideas often do (opportunity is not a lengthy visitor). The song in my head wasn’t notes or instruments, but senses and feelings. Opening with a rich bright fanfare, followed by a quiet, ever-increasing crescendo dwelving deeper into a misty forest. And at the center of the forest awaits a spectacular marvel, a masquerade in full brilliance. Therein lies the name.

I utilized the glockenspiel and vibraphone combo to keep an ethereal feeling to the piece, haunting but curious. I’m not satisfied with the opening fanfare bit yet, it needs some more attention. This was my first work with brass instruments and I quite enjoyed using them. The harmonics between them are fantastic! After the fanfare there’s some soft strings and a clarinet with bits of bassoon here and there. The music is pretty simple, which I wanted, the depth lies in the richness of the instrumentationing. This is only the first 1:36, visually it takes you to the edge of the forest’s center.

It’s dark and sinisteresque, but not Lovecraft dark, more like…………………… Shakespeare dark………..
Shakespeare dark with pixies. The trees look millenias old, and moss drapes from their ancient branches. It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Let me know what you think, and as always, keep in mind it’s just a computer generated version, so there are some limitations to the sound quality and realism blah blah blah it’s better than a midi.

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-Travis Conrad

So when I started writing music I experimented with a lot of different instruments, time signatures, tempos, etc. Most of the stuff ended up being an abomination to the word music itself. I wept over the utter atrociousness of it. But amongst that sea of putrid audio filth, one piece actually managed to create a pleasant sensation when listened to, and that would be the waltz I wrote, entitled the Festal Waltz.

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It’s written for a string ensemble, harp and celesta over a steadily growing base of pizzicato double basses and a taiko drum. I chose the taiko drum because it has a more organic sound than a timpani imho, but really either would work fine. Do keep in mind it’s just a computer generated version so the strings sound a little, for lack of a better word, synthetic, and the celesta is somewhat more tinny than I’d prefer. But listen, for the love of god, listen and comment.

My inspiration for the piece came from Shostakovich, the Russian composer-god who lived around the time of Stalin. His stuff is so rich in the ear. I suggest you go check him out on youtube. Like…. right now. Seriously go. Go. Why are you still reading this sentence and not at youtube.com? Stubborn bastard, anyway, the Second Waltz and the Festive Overture are my favourites, I really do advise you to give them a listen. I doubt you’ll be unimpressed. Shostakovich has such a way with music, it invokes such emotion, especially some of his symphonies. Powerful, powerful shit. And by shit I mean stuff. Really fucking awesome stuff.

Feedback is always welcome. Let me know what you thought of the waltz or Shostakovich or my new layout or the mess Harper has made of the Canadian government or that salad your sister brought over for your birthday party that had the canned tuna in it which you don’t really like but you ate anyway for your sister’s sake…… Please?

-Travis Conrad