Sexercise - 30 Minutes 57 Seconds

Written for a female only workshop on releasing sexual energy.

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It's the longest and slowest music2work2 track. Voices spend time getting to know each other, parts are shared and swapped, melodies arise and are allowed to breathe, themes are developed and allowed to climax.

I love this track - at 61 beats per minute and over 30 minutes long, it's perfect for losing yourself and allows plenty of time for deep concentration. I use it a lot when I'm working with images in photoshop or on the Flickr creative commons

The track was created in two continuous sittings, the strings were laid first followed by the keys - so to speak!

Lovers & Optimists Playlist

Weepr - Free Beats & Music Maker

I was settling down to write the page for Sexercise when Alex over at Stramash Consulting tweeted about a new music app called weepr.



It's kind of like sitting in a Japanese dentist's waiting room on 'shrooms - not that I've actually experienced that - but - I'm thinking....

It's a lot of fun to play with and the interface is really simple and intuitive; sure there's a hundred things that aren't right with it and certain simple features that would make it a hell of lot easier to use - but who cares - it's free and puts making music into everybody's hands and I'm all for that. As Alex says it need's an audio export function - you can hack your sound card if you want to invest the time - but I suspect Weepr know what they are doing. The easiest way to demonstrate what you have created is to publish their widget - and in doing so you (in this case - me) promote the Weepr brand - cunning.

I imagine they'll have a premium release somewhere down the line which they'll market to those who were curious enough to hand over their email to play with the free version. I seriously doubt that they're going to tempt musicians away from the tools they're already using, but, if they can make it easy for "non-musicians" to enjoy creating with it - and remember - there are a hell of lot more non-musicians than there are musicians - maybe they can create a new market and encourage more people to play with music - and wouldn't that be cool!

Jax Wedding Theme - 5 Minute 27 Seconds

String piece written for Jackie's wedding. Always thought this would work well for the signing of the register - very pensive, subtle but uplifting

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When I first started to develop these sessions, I would get people to give me two numbers; one between 45 and 200 and one between 2 and 13. I used these to set the tempo of the piece and the time signature. As I started playing with different numbers I started to use any combination: birthdates, meeting dates, age, etc, etc to come up with a tempo and signature to start with. This session's tempo and signature were set by combining the birthdays of the happy couple and then applying a "Top-Secret" algorithm.

When I think of wedding pieces, I am heavily influenced by the traditional church ceremonies I experienced growing up. As a Cathedral Chorister I loved the big sweeping sounds the church organ would make and the sheer size of the pieces that we would sing. When writing this piece I was thinking of how this would sound in a huge space played by a large orchestra - the keys that come in at the end are an indication of where the piece was going.

Jax is happily married to Chris and they have twins - another good outcome!

Lovers & Optimists Playlist

---------------- Now playing: music2work2 - Jax Wedding Theme via music2work2