H P Lovecraft

It has been a while since the last update on this blog. The 2nd half of the year has always been a very busy time for musicians. For me, I have been through some recitals of my works, a major annual concert of St Laurentius Chamber Orchestra, an ABRSM exam, Yamaha exam, another experimental instrument, and off course, many "entertainment" performance, music arranging, and loads of teaching.

In the middle of this crazy schedule, my movie-director friend, Marqy requires a score for an adaptation of a story by H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror at Redhook. It is basicaly a rambling story about a demonic cult that exists in our time (or Lovecraft's time to be exact). He renamed Redhook as Pasir Merah for the Indonesian adaptation, but I haven't read the script yet. So I turn on the mic and record some sounds after reading the original story, and here is the result:

Pasir Merah.mp3 (Size 1.46Mb)

USB from hell

In the middle of the night, when I was recording the last track for the ending credit of the movie KURSInya, my mic started to introduce a very annoying constant clicking noise. It was rather loud and occurs approximately every half second.

Tinkering with the cable connections did not help, so I decided to open the microphone. Due to its weird construction (it is a cheap dynamic microphone) I had to cut the cables to take out the mic out of its casing. I found that wiring the mic ground connection into a large, electrically isolated body reduces the noise. So I proceeded and finished the recording session.

However, the problem persists. The noise is reduced, but never fall to zero. The worst thing about it is I cannot put the mic back into its casing (I still cannot find a way to open it). So it is now hanging, naked on the stand.

Today I found that unplugging my USB printer from the computer eliminates the noise completely ...

Another Prodia Project

It looks like the folks in Prodia Lab (a health laboratory) really like to sing and dance. A few months ago a nation-wide competition was held between Prodia's branches to create the best song (about the company) with choreography. So one of the branch in Bandung asked me to write one. So I did it. I wrote a song, arranged it, and recorded a minus-one for them to sing along. Thanks god, they received the 1st prize with this song.

So ... they want to make another one for another national gathering between their marketing staffs. Yes it is just a gathering, no competition. With one note, they want it in the salsa style. So here is the minus-one, Salsa!

Prodia 2

The previous one is still available here:

Prodia 1