It’s been a shitty couple of days; sometimes all you can do is take the shit and transform it into something else.

I like this – it has a foreboding about it which is kind of cool as neither the keys or the lower strings ever play the minor third – everything is fifths, fourths, sevenths and ninths. It’s only the top strings that can’t resist hitting the G.

I’m releasing this and everything attached to it.

If you’d like to be notified of new published music2work2 become a free member and download the Writer’s playlist too.

So I just hit send to the mailing list to announce the publishing of the newest piece of music2work2 – Nath.

You can read the accompanying liner notes here

Annual members of music2work2 pay $15 a year and can download this and all current published tracks

Learn about membership here

Should be the final mix – fingers crossed -

Another few to go – but here’s where we are so far – the strings are a little fat – but I think we should be ready to publish by next week.

Get notified when new music2work2 is published, learn about free membership and free downloads here

I suspect like many, my phone is now my alarm clock. Aside from the rather worrying habit of checking my email 30 seconds after I open my eyes – this does give me the facility to choose what sound I wake up to.

I spent a month with Radiohead’s “No surprises” – which made me chuckle as I woke and those opening tones are a nice gentle way to come into the world, but recently I’ve been playing with different music2work2 themes.

I’ve been “living” with this for the last week and it seems to be doing the job very nicely – I’m up early with a bounce in my step after a nice calming start to the day:

Download audio file (ebm127.mp3)

Download MP3

Image: PhotonQ-Waking up under a shower of light By PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE – Flickr

One of the nice things about coming out to see Charlotte is that she has a load of old music2work2 that I haven’t listened to for ages; tracks that were being developed that never got finished, me experimenting with different voices etc, etc.

I had reminded myself this evening that I wanted to record the noise of the cicadas from the back porch – they are so loud and such a part of the environment that I reckoned they would work nicely as an additional voice in a music2work2 piece.

So – I fired up Audioboo to record the cicadas and just as I started to record – the Dorothy theme came on the stereo – it is a theme I wrote for Wendi’s grandmother who passed away a few years back; it has parts for piano, strings, bass and guitar – and while the execution isn’t great – I love the idea.

So – I ended up recording the track and book-ending it with cicadas…

Think I’ll be re-visiting this one when I get back to LA

via AudioBoo

Posted via email from Andrew McCluskey

Piano, Strings, Rhodes, Beats & Tribbles

$1.99 Download Now

I am actively focusing on developing new beats with reason and using them as the base track to freestyle on – it’s great fun.

The original beat track is in 7 time with a tempo of 42 beats per minute (thank you @DarinRMcClure) – makes for an interesting groove.  I ended up playing with several different beats and putting them through various oscillators and frequency filters – the Tribble sound started off as a chemical beat – go figure!

Writers & Writing Playlist

Piano, Strings and an 808 heart beat

$1.99 Download Now

I hope everybody had a great holiday – I certainly did.  I suspect I’m like many of you in that I use Christmas and New Year as a release valve after the pressure of the year.  Two weeks of relaxing, hanging out with family and friends and drinking and eating far too much – I love it!

2009 was a particularly challenging year and yet looking back – music2work2 made giant strides forward.  We completely re-designed the website, changed the logo, moved to a new recording platform and a new keyboard, distributed to iTunes and Amazon MP3 stores, wrote the score to a unique animated movie and sent out our first newsletter.  Not bad on reflection.

I cannot tell you how excited I am about this New Year – I’m going back to school next week to learn how to use the Topspin marketing platform – this will make it much easier for people to listen to and easily share music2work2.  I haven’t taken a class in 20 years – should be fun

This track was inspired by a chance encounter with a Techno gear head masquerading as a University professor – it was a great evening which resulted in us working up a piece built around a Roland 808 and an old Juno 60 – you can listen to the audioboo clip here.  Craig’s working on it for now and when he’s done I’ll add a piano track – I think it might be kinda cool.

Writers & Writing Playlist

One of my favorite pieces of solo piano music on music2work2 is Emma - along with its accompanying piece, the music was written to help a friend get through chemo.

Download audio file (emma2.5.mp3)

Emma chose to visualize her cancer as a blowfish – it gave her something tangible to direct her energy at and guess what – it worked. Emma not only came out the other end and continued driving her boats across the planet, she ended up writing a book about her experience. I think Em puts it best with the following:

"Now I know I am a no-body and not famous, I am not important and haven’t “done” anything special, no feat of amazing endurance like climbing Everest in my slippers but that is hopefully just the point I think. I am an ordinary Jo with an ordinary story that is not unusual – after all there are 44,000 of us each year diagnosed with breast cancer. There is plenty of information advising us how we will feel throughout the experience, the notorious chemotherapy looms large with each leaflet, but there is little to tell us how to handle this disease – how to get out of bed and how to look yourself in the mirror and deal with the daily nightmare.

I think you all know about the book and it’s aim – I hope my story will be inspirational and motivational to women and men who are also battling this horrific disease but I also hope the account is useful to the family and friends who are also affected in a profound way. I hope you can help me get my story and my message out there.

If my book helps to get one person off their sofa and fighting then I will have succeeded!

Thank you all

Em

www.emmapontin.com

Posted via email from Andrew McCluskey

Piano, Strings, Organ & Beats for Jennifer & Eric

$1.99 Download Now

Here’s another piece written for two beautiful people who just announced their engagement; Congratulations Jennifer & Eric – may you have a long and wonderful life together.

I’ve been laughing over the name of this track – Jeneric – I’m sure people have been watching the development of it and going – "Silly Andrew – doesn’t know how to spell generic, and also – why would you call a unique piece of music Generic!?" Well – now that you know the piece was written for Jennifer and Eric, I’m guessing you can work the title out, also, there’s nothing like a little misinformation to get people thinking.

This is the first track that I have developed to completion in 2009 and it’s getting published in November – yep, it’s been an "interesting" year. The track continues 2008′s foray into working with beat tracks, Eric listens to a lot of dub music and I wanted to reflect some of that in the underlying groove of the track. As for the tempo – well – after a little research I found that Jennifer is the 84th most popular name for girls whereas Eric is the 86th most popular name for boys – so – I split the difference and the track is cut at 85 beats per minute!

Writers & Writing Playlist