I recently had the pleasure of scoring a short documentary about Dogtown Ranch, an animal shelter east of Austin, Texas.
Dogtown Ranch Sanctuary Rescue and Rehab promotes education and training for persecuted and misunderstood bully breeds, but accepts all canine breeds in crisis, dogs needing to get off the streets and dogs needing to be rescued from euthanasia lists, and abusive situations.
Here’s the video:
And if you’d like to donate, you can do that, here.
Both tracks featured in the video are available for licensing, now: Contemplation, Shelter
‘Mysterio‘, one of the very first Shadowater Music tracks, was placed in the “Slim Pickin’s” episode of Bronco Roads, earlier this year. It was used for a segment detailing the history of Spanish American cowboys, the Vaqueros.
‘Mysterio‘ comes in at the 5:00 minute mark, but feel free to watch the whole episode.
Most of the updates are code base and custom admin panel related and therefore invisible, but the music page got a nifty reworking. I took some of the stress off the page loads by switching to the Stratus SoundCloud player. Now, there’s just one player at the bottom, rather than a separate player for each track.
I also switched out the track navigation in favor of dynamically loading new tracks with jQuery/AJAX. On a side note, the Stratus player isn’t currently able to handle dynamically loaded track links, so I had to grab a copy and update it myself to handle them.
First off, I need to post more often, and I’m working on it; I promise.
Second, I’m a couple of weeks away from sharing a few new tracks, tracks that I’ll be using to introduce myself to a particular music library. No pressure.
Third, I’ve had a blast performing, composing, and mixing in my new studio room over the last year. Being able to trust what your ears are hearing saves a ton of time and just makes life more fun.
Finally, the latest episode of Pensado’s Place features Castle/Buffy/The Unit composer Robert Duncan. I enjoyed the interview (especially the junk yard music store segment), so I thought I’d share:
The wife* and I purchased a house in mid December of last year, the culmination of months of online searching and real world touring. There were all kinds of practical reasons why we needed to do this (our now 16 month old daughter becoming self-propelled, record low interest rates, wet bars, etc.), but we all know the real reason anyone buys a house: larger, dedicated studio space!
After getting moved and settled in, I set to work on turning the back bedroom into my new recording/composing studio.
The room has a walk in closet, perfect for isolating computer noise and storing extra equipment.
A Closet, I mean “equipment room”.
A little paint:
Before And After
I went with Shadowater colors, of course.
The dimensions of the space weren’t bad, acoustically speaking. There was some obvious flutter echo among other things, so I worked with Auralex Acoustics to make the room sound better and bigger than it actually is. Here’s what they came up with:
We could have foam EVERYWHERE!No, seriously. Everywhere.
A couple weeks after placing the order with Sweetwater Sound, two giant boxes arrived on the door step, and with it, several days worth of physical labor (not to mention the requisite candy).
A more civilized solution
The standard installation method for the acoustic foam is to mount it directly to the walls with Auralex’s TubeTak liquid adhesive. We plan on being in this house for the foreseeable future, but I (not to mention my wife) wasn’t too excited about permanently modifying the walls of our new investment, so I watched an episode of Macgyver, then came up with the idea of gluing columns of foam to 4′ X 6″ strips of peg board, which could then be hung like picture frames onto the walls. For the ceiling and corner bass traps, I went with industrial strength velcro. The room sounds great, now. Looks pretty good, too:
I’m currently working on a project I’ve given the working title ‘Conversational Guitar’. It’s a collection of instrumentals featuring electric guitar and ethnic percussion. It will either find a home with a production library or be the first release on my new publishing label, Jason Savell Music. Should be finishing up sometime in August.
In the meantime, I thought I’d share a little guitar improvisation I recorded while working out a tone for the second track of CG. It’s called ‘When In Doubt, Improvise’. Thanks for listening.
My newest track, Most Wanted, got its first licensed use last week. The full track is being featured in a PR video for a police department. I guess I always knew the law was going to catch up with it; I just didn’t think it would happen this fast.
I’m trying out bandcamp as a way of making more of my music available for purchase. My main focus is commissioned and licensed music, but the music business is so far from the monolithic days, there’s no excuse not to participate.
So far, bandcamp has been quick and easy. I’ll still use Tunecore to get more mainstream oriented tracks to iTunes, Amazon, etc., but bandcamp’s approach makes more sense for most of my work.
Check out Most Wanted and Final Fight on bandcamp:
I’ve set a process in motion that will hopefully result in a new and improved look for shadowater.com.
In the past, I’ve always designed and developed the site myself. While my development skills are pro level (in the right languages, anyway), I can’t say the same for my attempts at graphic design. This visual issue is currently being resolved by an *actual* graphic designer.
One of the coming things I’m excited about (which is why I did it first) is that I’ve finally gotten around to integrating Word Press into the site. I’ve always been a fan of their content manager, but never liked handing over control of the site implementation itself to the WP machine. After a little research into the online documentation, though, I was able to get what I wanted from WP without dealing with anything I didn’t, and it only took a few hours. Open Source is awesome.
Another change is one I’ve been planning for awhile. I’ve always liked the Shadowater Studios name, but it emphasizes the means, not the end, which is the music. As part of the coming relaunch, ‘Shadowater Studios’ will become ‘Shadowater Music’. This is what those in the marketing business call a brand reimagimodificiation (I assume).
The relaunch is planned for January, but some elements, like the Word Press powered Musical Musings will be functional by the time you read this post.
