Day 1#
Starting up#
Just looking at the theme, all that comes to mind while trying to come up with ideas on the piano is my stuff for the last OST Composing jam 8, since that theme also had a woman looking thoughtful too…
Because of that I’m going to start by trying to come up with an idea by just inputting notes with the mouse, just to avoid the muscle memory from last jams stuff kicking in because of the similarities in the subjects on the paintings in both 😅
Hopefully will get something going today.
A bit later#
So… spent a few hour’s trying ideas painstakingly inputting them with the mouse to a piano track, and got a little lydian dominant-ish thing I liked.
Now since its using lydian dominant, it sounds really playful and a bit goofy and might be a bit too much considering the mood of the woman in the image, but I did moody stuff in the last impressions jam and the OST Composing jam #8 before this one, so I decided to just do more up-beat stuff because I really hate doing the same type of stuff over and over again.
When starting to arrange from the skeleton I inputted before, I decided to use some strings playing pizzicato, since lydian dominant has that playful feel to it and I also wanted to test the pizzicato samples from the new string library I used in OST Jam #8, as I had only used/tried the legato/longs patches there.
Arranging was just mostly deciding which instruments play what line, and I mostly just put everything on the strings, putting some doubling on the woodwinds and harp in the first section, and then for the latter parts having the celesta take the lead, which then gets taken over by the woodwinds again (Oboe, Clarinet).
In the latter part and slightly at the end of the first part, I put a lot of the sections in 2 part divisi to get a little extra textural flavour since this library has actual divisi samples and wanted to test those in practice. and it worked pretty nicely in my opinion (at least feel like that for now..), but still feel that the switch from the first section to the later parts feels bit jarring with the celeste coming in and all, so will see if it still feels off after a break.
First idea arrangement test#
Day 5#
After the first day I tried to continue the initial idea forward, but I just couldn’t get my brain working again for that, and I did try to for multiple days…
So because of that, I decided to do switch over to Dorico to sketch new stuff in notation instead, since this sort of shift usually helps get my brain going again 😁
I spent a few hours and got some separate ideas sketched out on a string section, hoping I’d have some separate parts to start arranging from. I loosely started these ideas from a little back and forth semitone movement thing I used on the previous track, keeping that as a sort of not so great motive to help have some feeling of cohesion in them 😁.
Some parts feel OK to me as of writing this, but some are just pretty rough starts of ideas, like the stuff at the end, which I hopefully will get some ideas for tomorrow.
New idea sketches#
Day 6#
Really not feeling the theme this time around at all…
The first thing I did feels too quirky to fit the vibe of the painting, the new idea feels a bit meh and does not fit that well with the first one, and I can’t seem to get myself in a good flow at all, even with trying to start the new track yesterday.
I did some rough arrangement tests today with throwing lines to different instruments, but working the new track just feels really forced to me…
I think I might end up only submitting the first track that I managed to get at least over 1 minute during the first day, since I’m really not feeling it this jam, but will try to add more to it if I can before the final day
(emphasis on the if 😅)
But, here’s the little that I got done today at least 😅
New idea arrangement testing#
Day 10#
So… I couldn’t get any motivation to continue the track anymore, so just going to start making the youtube upload and submit the thing, just so I dont constanstly have a nagging feeling of “I should try to continue the jam track while there’s still time” even though I just cant do it 😂.
Since I’m submitting early this time around, I’m going to try and make a video with the sheet music on top of the theme painting.
This turned out to not be too hard, since Dorico lets you export the score out in transparent PNG files, which meant that I just set the layout settings to a good size, chose transparent and then exported the images and layed them out in my video editing software (Kdenlive).
I did encounter an issue where dorico still added a white background under the divisi and unison texts which I couldn’t find a way to turn off, but I used a chroma key effect in Kdenlive to erase all the white color from the images and that did the tríck.
For exporting the score for the video, this post by joseph sowa was really helpful.
I added the theme painting in the background of the notation, but I had to make it pretty transparent to not hurt the readability of the video, but hopefully its still somewhat seeable 😅
Hopefully in the next jam, meaning the Impressions: OST #3, I’ll feel the theme prompt a bit more and actually get more done, since my submission this time around is only what I managed to get done on the first day of the jam and I feel really lazy even submitting just this, but hey, you can’t hit a homerun everytime 😉
Anyway, now its just making the itch project and submitting that, so I’ll probably end this devlog here 👋.