Moving Along

It might seem from my blog that there is nothing happening in my life which is just not true I tells you! Some updates:

DUCHESS OF MALFI

I've been pretty busy recently touching up the orchestrations for my sketches for the show and have just handed these to Margaret so that she start work on some lyrics or see if they fit her vision for the show. Accompanied with a piano score and an orchestrated track are some notes about my original intentions for the songs. Sometimes these are very specific - I have a idea of where this song will go in the narrative or who will sing it. Other times I will have a much more vague idea of the emotions of what the song is really about. The orchestrations convey this more than most, but if Margaret has a diferent idea about about the lyrics or the placement of the song, I will review the orchestrations when she has drafted her lyrics so that there is more of a match between the two - so that the words of the song are perfectly conveyed.

Unfortunately my progress with writing anything else has really been hampered by my upgrade to Sibelius 5. Sibelius 5 has overhauled there playback system to take advantage of their relationship (read corporate take over) with Kontakt Player and Kontakt samples now renamed Sibelius Sounds. The downside of this move is that Sibelius 5's playback engine is now totally geared to those who use those samples and are familiar with that playback engine. I however am used to Sibelius' playback engine and use samples created by a number of different sources such as Vienna Symphonic Library that I run through Gigastudio. This has resulted in a massive amount of work in reprogramming Sibelius to do what it is told (which it always did in previous versions) rather than trying to second guess me. My set up is the same one used by such film composers as Hans Zimmer so I can only imagine that they are as pissed off as me!

Either way I have sent Margaret 5 songs of which I'm really proud. Naturally they are going to be the Duchess' own key songs - the real tour de force songs. As soon as we have lyrics for these I'll record them with some up and coming talent I know in London to get a demo together to put on a show dotcom. Also some of you will know that I've approach Shoshana Bean who has agreed to at least look over the songs. More than happy to settle for some constructive feedback (from a singer's point of view - they are going to be a real work out), but would love it if she agreed to perform just even one of the songs or record one of them. It's likely though that I won't hear anything - but hey, that's showbusiness.

XANDERHOUGH.COM

Well it's coming kids. That's all I can say. I've asked my friend Kev who originally bought the domain name to give me the hosting details and ftp settings so that I can upload a temporary website while a professional one is being developed. I've asked Rebecca Sayer, a freelance graphic designer who did some work for me with Beenham Band to design me a logo for my freelance work/website. Unfortunately Beccy has been hit by a mountain of work and so won't be able to take on the project for a while, so again I've come up with something in the meantime. I'm hoping to have it up and running in the near future.