Below is the first pass of the new music for my friend Pasquale's animated short, "No Recipe". The piece begun as a school project for Paz, but the chance to screen it after the fact was motivation enough to bump things up a bit with new music and sound effects.

What you'll see and hear in the version below is original dialogue, new music, and new scratch sound effects the Paz did just for the screening. Those sound effects will be the next things that I'll be replacing, and there are some definitely some spots where I could add some more music as well.

I did the music in Logic 8 with the available software instruments and a USB MIDI keyboard controller, and I'm not going to pretend that the orchestra doesn't sound a bit fake here and there, but Abbey Road Studios was booked and I couldn't get in there with the LSO on short notice. My bad. Throughout the writing and tracking (which were simultaneous processes in this case) I had a few web browser tabs open with YouTube uploads of old Looney Tunes and some newer stuff from the Cartoon Network that Paz suggested, like Dexter's Laboratory, as inspiration. No, I did not plagiarize anything...even if I had wanted to it would have taken me longer to try and duplicate that music than to come up with my own.

Not in my wildest dreams could I ever come close to doing what guys like Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn did in their time. These two gents were the geniuses behind the classic Warner Bros. cartoon scores, and in case you're inclined towards brushing them off, I invite you to watch this and listen closely to the music, thinking about the fact that each and every sound was thought up and then written down before being performed by an orchestra to a click-track (that they invented) and synched to the animation basically on-the-fly as it was being recorded. Skill, folks, skill and talent. Stalling wrote a full score every week during his two decades at that job.

I remember when I was at school I talked to Dennis Esson, a local trombonist (tromboner?), about performing these type of cartoon scores. He is a very accomplished musician both in classical music and jazz, and he said that without a doubt it is some of the hardest music to play because of the rapid key, tempo, and time signature changes, and because advanced techniques in the extremes of the range are called upon for each instrument on a regular basis: Stuff that's really high or really low or really squeaky or growly or weird, etc.

Back to me and Logic 8. That particular software package doesn't give me access to any samples of the kinds of zany things that instrumentalists are called upon to do on a session for a cartoon, not that I would necessarily know when and how to employ them if it did. I haven't done anything exactly like this before, but it was fun jumping in the deep end with a deadline looming. Coming up with snippets of music that corresponded with the action on screen was the hardest part, and I found that in order to get the timing right I had to sort of start at my desired ending point and work backwards with the writing in order to figure out how many bars I needed at a given tempo. Details such as that are not normally a concern whilst playing bass in a country band.

So here's the lastest iteration of "No Recipe", a work in progress:

No recipe, remastered from darkmotion on Vimeo.

Check out a good article about the genius of Carl Stalling here.