crow caw music works

. . . where “newer” just means “newer than 2008 or so”. Anyway, it’s time (2024) to clean up and reorganize this page.

Note: I only edited and checked this page on a desktop computer: I have no idea if it’s going to be usable on a mobile. My apologies if you’re trying to use it on one.

Visual Purple — now with brass parts from the other side of the world

In 2022, thanks to a suggestion from my musical guru and mentor, I started investigating the freelancers on fiverr with a view to hiring good musicians to replace synth parts on some of my old tracks. There aren’t very many people around who are equally good on drums, guitar, trumpet, strings, etc., but I am equally mediocre on a lot of them.

Long ago, I wrote a little piece as a wedding present for two friends of mine. Up to that time, everything I produced I did myself with MIDI and samples. But in this case, the bride’s brother was a professional brass player. I talked him into playing a couple of short solos in the middle of the piece. There’s no question that it really added something intangible. (I talk about this piece later on this page).

I think my first experiment went very well; I took a piece called “Visual Purple” which had some syntheisized/smple brass parts, and hired a professional brass player in Ukraine to replace my lines with his playing.

So the first audio below is the original mix of the track using all synthesized/sampled instruments. (Note, if you don’t want to have to listen to the whole track, the parts of interest are between about 4:00 and 5:30.)

Visual Purple (6:18) 256k MP3 format (2022-04-27 edit) ©2022 tim p scott

(click (triangle) to play)

The next block shows Dima’s trumpet part in isolation.

Dima’s trumpet parts (abut 1:30 ) 256k MP3

(click (triangle) to play)

The final player shows the track with his playing replacing the first and second trumpet solos. As an experiment, I kept some of the original trumpet line for the second part. Note how perfectly he matches the timing and tone of the existing track.

Visual Purple (with new trumpet parts) ©2022 tim p scott

(click (triangle) to play)

The next piece I’m going to see if I can real players to work on will be even more of a challenge. If you listen particularly from about 1:00 to 3:30 there are a number of string solo and string sections lines, some with an oboe doubling the melody. I don’t know if I can afford to have this down the way I’m visualizing it. Any suggestions are welcome.

Magnus Magnificus (current all electronic version) ©2013-2022 tim p scott

(click (triangle) to play)

The Hans Zimmers and Danny Elfmans (besides being geniuses) have huge production staffs that can can take their electronic scores, reduce MIDI to notation, copy the parts, hire the players and orchestras, etc., and have all the money they need to do that from the producers who hire them. I have none of that so…anyway, you get the picture.

Trying a couple of different WordPress techniques to quickly embed audio tracks…

Well, “newer” is relative here….let’s just say I’m using this page to experiment with embedding audio files in various formats. WordPress has a couple of quick ways to embed a widget to do this. One uses an “audio shortcode” — seems to work OK; note that it has a sound on/mute button and a volume slider.

Here’s the first new thing in a long time. The title doesn’t mean anything, it’s just so I have something to call it.

I will just mention that it grew out of the Wizard’s suggestion that you can’t spend all your playing time just working on sight reading and other music; you just have to jam and improvise and see what comes up. With my new piano it’s such a pleasure to just play it. I set up my “capture” system (I did a youtube bit about it, see more information in this post) and grabbed some audio and MIDI bits and did a big arrangement of everything.

“Happy Happy” is from the Glossolalia CD. Here it is as a WAV and MP3 file.

Happy Happy! (4:11) Uncompressed WAV format ©2002 tim p scott

(click (triangle) to play)

Happy Happy! (4:11) 256kbps MP3 format ©2002 tim p scott

(click (triangle) to play)

Buzz Kill (6:11) 256kbps MP3 format ©2013 tim p scott

(click (triangle) to play)

The following is the same file with a different player widget.

Some historical notes about music file hosting…

I originally started using WordPress to try to host my own tracks. The plan I had with them way back then didn’t have very much storage available, and the kinds of audio files you could upload was limited. So once SoundCloud launched it looked like a good alternative. I could put the track on that host and link a player from WordPress to it. But as SoundCloud got bigger, the cost of it got too high so it became prohibitive to use that way (there are probably still players on this site that link to it so they are broken). SC had a promotion a few years ago which gave me several months at one of its premium plans. This allowed me to have many hours of tracks on it. But when the promotion ended I decided I didn’t want to pay for another web hosting place.

But now the WordPress plan I have has a satisfyingly large disk space budget and can handle all kinds of media files, and has good embedded player options.

Meanwhile via DistroKid and CDBaby I submitted all my work since 1996 to Spotify, YouTube, iHeartMusic, iTunes, Google Play, etc. You can usually just search for my artist name (“tim p scott”).

(continuation of old material on this page): …..One of the nice things about the WordPress plan I have is that there is plenty of space to host media (I think I have 5 GB). On top of that, I can manage tracks and their players in one place.

So I’m going to need to go back and connect some of the songs I had here to the WordPress media player.  But now the CSS I carefully designed for the embedded WordPress audio player no longer works as well so as you can see I have some research to do. My apologies….

So here’s my decorated basic wordpress player that seems still to be valid:

Jolly Diatoms (Jul 2013 draft) (4:05) ©2013 tim p scott

(click (triangle) to play)

(The above was sort of embarrassing; it played a track that wasn’t even mine! But I fixed it 7/2018)

Some new tunes for 2011

Warning on the following: I put these up here when I still used SoundCloud, but I don’t have a paid account there anymore so some of the following players are probably broken.

“Kronecker’s Epsilon”

(Math nerd alert…think “Kronecker’s Delta”.) This is a track mainly based on a bunch of guitar playing and very little synth stuff.

Maybe it’s my fault since if I move stuff around on soundcloud I have to make sure that I fix the link here too.

If you’re interested, here’s what the code looks like for the soundcloud connector:

“Dyspareunia”

(Dictionary nerd alert…this is just a word I pulled out of my … memory … that has nothing to do with the track. It’s only about 1:40 anyway so the title is just there so I can call it something.)

“A ser(i)ous thing”

My tracks may not be getting better, but they sure are getting longer to get out. This one started back in August of 2010 and was finished in March 2011. Other things are going on at the same time but this is more or less ready to listen to. Enjoy!

Some new tunes for 2010

“Haborthelem”

No, I don’t have any idea what that word means, or even if I’ve spelled it right.

The “haborthelem” (?) samples and the “party” background both come from the OLPC free sound set (more information here). The “party” is a field recording of a Kavadi festival in Montreal; and the “haborthelem” is from a group of samples showing the different kind of digital signal processing that can be applied to an audio file. The rest of the samples are from all over the place. Soft synths used were Zebra2, Dimension Pro and Crystal 2.4.8 (for a great koto patch). Everything was assembled in Ableton Live as usual (version 8 this time.)

I get a big kick out of listening to this, I think it conveys the party atmosphere it’s supposed to:

“Magnapure”

Magnapure (version 3) (2:57) from “Songs in work 2010-2011” ©2010 tim p scott

(click (triangle) to play)

This is just a working title, not being able to think of anything better at the moment; mainly because it uses a lot of loops from Puremagnetik soundware developers. The player to the right has a first cut at an arrangment.

Next up there were a couple tracks from around Feb 2010: “Whispers of Doom” and “Robot Monster 3”.

No stamps (version 4) (5:00) from “Songs in work 2008-2009” ©1995-2009 tim p scott

(click (triangle) to play)

Blorfing thru space

Also being offered on this page is a hoary relic from the Tim P Scott Archives. “Blorfing thru space” was one of the very first things the nascent composer wrote using his trusty little SC-55. It hasn’t made its way onto any of the “official” releases, but only existed in audio on a CD of archives from about 1996. But the dub on that disk had distortion problems due to improper gain staging.

So we managed to locate and unearth the original data files that created it (in the “Metro” sequencer format) and re-recorded it from a Roland SC-880. Then Scott took the audio files and did a tweak and remix in Ableton Live. Here are the original and remixed versions; enjoy:

Blorfing thru space (original) (4:05) from “Collected Works Vol. 1” ©1995-2009 tim p scott

(click (triangle) to play)

Blorfing thru space (2009 Remix) (4:05) from “Collected Works Vol. 1” ©2009 tim p scott

(click (triangle) to play)

Page#43/last edited 2024-03-04