Jon Brion(ish) theme

The director I'm working with wanted a Jon Brion(ish) theme with some Indian timbres. What do you think?

The song is entitled "bug" and can be found on this page.

http://alexschiffmusic.com/Listen.html

The director I'm working with wanted a Jon Brion(ish) theme with some Indian timbres. What do you think?

The song is entitled "bug" and can be found on this page.

Listen

Dude this is amazing imo. That continuous (sitar?) rhythm sounds really familiar and like something i'd write myself. It has a very Jon Brion feel in regards to levity and emotion.

What sample libraries do you use? Quality is awesome...sounds acoustic, possibly is

Thanks Duncan. Most of the instruments are samples from the Logic library (garage band jam packs I guess?) The strings that come in are mix between jam pack and Vienna Symphony Library. Not much of it is acoustic. Some of the percussion is (gong, tambourine, shaker) and there is some light organ and clav from my Nord Electro.

I'm going to leave you my thoughts not really being too familiar with the work of Jon Brion, so keep that in mind if that excuses any of the issues I'm about to bring up.

The track is certainly cute and it's got a very light-hearted feel to it, but it's also rather static and minimalistic. Besides the instrumentation, I also found it almost entirely lacking in ANY hints of Indian musical tradition. This sounds like it could be put straight into a very Western romantic comedy film.

While it's obviously intended to be repetitive, I think that some more variations in your use of the ensemble as well as perhaps the odd change in dynamics and tempo could have added a lot more colour to this. The latter two suggestions may conflict with the style you were intending though, so those could be disregarded if so. But the fact still remains that more experimentation and change in the realm of which instrument is leading, which is accompanying, HOW it's accompanying, etc. could have really elevated this track to another level.

Good production though; the mix is balanced and nothing gets drowned out too much. You've also sequenced it nicely and made good use of Logic's wonderful library. Overall this is a good track, it just seems stunted by a lack of sophistication.

Thanks for sharing. :)

Marius: Thanks for your comments regarding my sketch.

To defend it a bit... haha... it actually was intended for a Western romantic comedy. The main female lead is Indian, but she is culturally very much American.

As far as a lack of sophistication... you are quite right that I don't develop the ideas. This is mostly because I only spent a few hours on it and submitted it to the director. I wish I had more stuff to put on my website, but since I've only been a "film composer" for a few months, I don't have a lot of material to put up there.

Maybe I will go back and rework it to make it more interesting.