Leeran

A filmed youtube musical about two kids going to a frat party. Part 1: Part 2: The music is quite pop-y, but it goes through a pretty wide variety of musical styles. Tell me what you think!

I just made a new website/portfolio, this time I will dedicate it 100% to music. I want to get people's opinions on it, both the website design/interface, and the "professional"-ness of the music. http://www.leeranz.com

Thanks for the comments! Obviously I wasn't making any attempt to be innovative or anything. In terms of the composition, I just wanted to be catchy and musical theatre-y. When I called in everyone to record, I was a little afraid they would make the music worse, but their imperfections ended up adding something personal to it, in my opinion. I did use auto-tune a little, but only when it was absolutely necessary. If it was pretty good, I disabled it. Originally, when recording the chorus, I was going to have the class come to my house at once, and I was going to set up two condenser mics, but that ended up being really hard to schedule. So I overdubbed my own voice 15 times, each time doing a different accent, on three different octaves. It kinda sounds like a male chorus, but it's good enough. There actually are panning effects, but I think you need to click the High Quality button to enable them. Listening with headphones makes them more obvious.

This is a mini-musical that I made with my math class the last week of my senior year. Check it out, and tell me what you think!

Why don't you give this a try. I originally wrote it for a combo with alto and tenor saxes, guitar, piano, bass, and drums, so I edited it a little. The drum part is a little, umm, sparsely written, but if I'm sure he'll get what to do when he hears the bass lines. Campaign - Piano.pdf Campaign - Acoustic Bass.pdf Campaign - Drum Set.pdf Campaign.pdf Campaign - Trumpet.pdf Campaign - Trombone.pdf

That is a very popular song these days. You should do Amora, too OKAY!

Often, when I post something here, I feel like people try hard to protect my "feelings." Likewise, when i hear something I don't like, I feel kinda awkward posting a scathing review. I wonder if it would be possible to set up some sort of system of anonymous feedback? I don't know if this feedback should be public or private, and I haven't thought over this in detail. I just want to get and be able to give more fair and honest opinions.

Arturo Ui Soundtrack Lead sheets: Index of /music/Arturo Ui/Lead Sheats This is the soundtrack to the musical I wrote for my senior project. All the lyrics are taken from the dialog of the play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. I had about a month to compose the music, and I would have done a lot differently if given more time. But I'm pretty happy with how a lot of it ended up. A lot of the songs had more complex orchestrations that the band and/or the singers never had time to rehearse with. For these songs, I just played piano. The soundtrack was recorded in a single, 6 hour-long session. All the performers involved are high-schoolers, with varying levels of experience. The jazzier songs are a little on the weak side, and I'm aware of that. The reason for this is that when we recorded them, the drummer was unavailable, and was added in later. This weakened both the time and general feel of these songs. Someday, we might be able to rerecord them. Some of the best songs, in my opinion, are Whitewash, Never Betray Your Friends, Prologue, and A Misunderstood Man. This was a huge project, and I was under pretty severe time constraints, but overall I'm pretty with the result. My school put on the production in November. The singers are all members of the drama department, and some of them have never sung before, so they get some slack. In Praise of Honest Dogsborough.pdf RomaGhost.pdf

Well, I never even gave it to the school orchestra. They sound unlistenable with just about anything. We're going to spend the last few days of band class working on this piece and a friend of mine's piece, so we'll see if this sounds any good after a little practice

The sax parts are great. Really cool stuff in there. I would have the sax come in early. Cause the way it starts could be a little stronger. As soon as the sax comes in it holds my attention, but the synth is a little bleh.

Yeah, the top one. I didn't realize the bottom one was you, I thought you meant sampling in the hip-hop sense. Wow, you have a great tone. 'Scuse me. I posted a blues solo the I did with my school band, if you want to take a listen.

So for the Ellington competition, are school submitted a song named Jeep's Blues, which was fun, cause it was a nice, easy F Blues. We weren't allowed to mess with the recordings, so I could probably solo better than this, but this was the best overall take of the two that we did. Our sax player is the first soloist, and then I take a piano solo at around 2:30: https://www.charmsoffice.com/charms/SchoolFiles/MercerIsHSB02%20Jeeps%20Blues%20MIHS%20Avast%20recording.mp3 Sadly we didn't make it in the competition. Oh well.

Seems like this had good energy to it. Your tone could use a little work, but I'm sure your sober playing is much cleaner. Also, again I'm sure you know this, you over emphasized some notes that seemed weird being emphasized, like the concert F and Ab over the Eb chord. I mean, they're in the scale and theoretically work, but they were awkward the way you used them. It kind of sounded like you were doing the wrong blues scale at those points. I love hearing other jazz players on this forum. I might post one of my own solos...

Does anyone think the bassoon solo sounds kinda random?

From 0:34 to around 0:36 my hands aren't really aligned that well. Around 2:18-2:19, I accidently hit 2 notes with one finger that I didn't mean to do. Then overall, the piece has pretty overly heavy use of the pedal. Then there were some points where I did chord changes I probably wouldn't have done if I was really consciously thinking about it. Just a few things that I thought were "imperfect" about it. As for improvising, I just play a lot of jazz. And I've done solo piano gigs where I had no music and I just had to play background stuff for hours on end, and you figure stuff out from that. Plus I play in jazz band at school and jazz combos. And I've been jamming with my dad since I started playing piano.

Thanks for the comments. I would have made it longer, but it was already like 9 PM when I started, and if I added anything to it the next day, it would go against the "My Mood Today" thing.

That's a good idea. See, it's easier to record myself on a keyboard, but the piano is always more "inspiring." If you want to work on jazz, probably the first thing I would run would be my 2-5-1s. Just do them in every key and work on soloing over them. Also, get a fake book and run tunes. Every tune has changes, and you can try improvising over them.

I actually think I improvise better than I compose. I never remember my best ideas long enough to write them down. I keep saying I'll record more of my improvs, but by the time I get all my recording stuff set up, the mood usually dies.

In some ways, yours is an improvement over the original. I like your cleaner harmonies at the beginning. Still, more credit goes to the original, since your is pretty closely based on it. Still nice job, especially for 1-2 hours of work.

Yeah, I used to use Reason (v 2.5). I actually like how some of the Orkester sounds more then Logic. It had a "vintage" quality to it. But Rewire was more hassle than it was worth. Here's a track for another video game that I made back in 9th grade using Reason sounds: http://lzr.cc/music/ovid/theme.mp3 (I didn't manage to finish programming the game until 11th grade, but at least it's all done). I liked using the sound where you pressed a note and the violins would automatically do a major or minor scale up really fast. Plus the brass had a cool quality. But Logic is so much better organized and the sounds are more polished, but they sound a little too polished.

Thanks for all the comments. The game is an ambient puzzle game, a lot like Myst. All the outdoor areas don't have music, just ambient sounds. In some of these, a little jingle is played when you first get there, though not looped. Pratahm Theme and Island Theme are two of the intro jingles. Then, indoor areas have background music, but everything has to be ambient cause your solving puzzles, not killing enemies or anything. When I wrote control room, they said "Write something I could solve Calculus to." So, I hope that clears some things up as to why they sound like that. As far as whether the game will be released, it doesn't show signs of nearing completion. It's an Indie project, and I was just doing it as something to do right before I composed my musical. They have a demo on their site, and the graphics are really good. The gameplay is so-so, but it is a pretty early demo. If it never gets finished, then at least I have some more songs for my portfolio. :) I use Logic Studio 8 to make the tracks, something I strongly recommend if you use a mac. For only $500 you get Logic Pro, a professional DAW; all the Apple Jam Packs, which are really good for the most part; a ton of audio instruments (esp. Sculpture which I use all the time to make natural sounding synths, plus a Hammond B3 simulator, and a rhodes simulator, and some analog synths); really high quality effects, and tonnnns of them (good reverb, compression, EQ, pitch correction, ringshifter, chorus, everythingggg), Soundtrack Pro, an audio editor; Mainstage, for doing live shows, Quick Time Pro, which has been surprisingly useful; and probably a bunch of other things I haven't had to use yet. Everything is really easy to use, and if you have a good sound card, you can record high quality audio as well. I've used it to record jazz combos, and it works great for that stuff too. For movie scoring, you can import video and keep your place with the movie. I don't work for Apple or anything, but this is a pretty amazing deal if I say so myself. EDIT: I forgot, all the piano sounds are from my keyboard which is a Yamaha S90 ES.

I was feeling really down one day, and I decided to record a little improv. I remember at the time thinking how I was pouring my heart into the keyboard. Now I just listen to it and smile at how melodramatic it is. I usually play in a jazzy style when I improvise, but for some reason I wasn't feeling that. It's not perfect, and there are a couple points I slip up and hit an odd note, but it definitely conveys how I felt that day. http://lzr.cc/music/SpringBreakMusic/day1_improv.mp3

This is a piece that I made on Monday after not seeing anyone the whole day. By the end of the day, I was in a really "surreal" mood, and I made this. http://lzr.cc/music/SpringBreakMusic/day2_moodtoday.mp3

So as a fun project, I re-wrote our school fight song (which used to be a traditional marching band song) into a slightly hipper version with the same lyrics. I then performed it with a small group at our school assembly. Here's a link to our performance: . Skip through the opening monologue if you want. The song itself starts at about the one minute point. You'll have to trust me that everything sounded much cooler live. Also, the video has occasional half-second skips that get worse as the video progresses and make our time look really bad.

I completely did not mean to offend you. I was just having fun, and also demonstrating how it could be a pop song quite easily. I'm glad you mention Karl Jenkins, because now I kind of see the direction your coming from. I personally am not a huge fan of his music (though I do dig the mustache), but a lot of people are, and I think your piece would appeal to those same audiences. I'd classify some of his music orchestral pop. It has a lot of similar sensibilities to pop music, even though it uses orchestral instruments.