On Monday afternoon I finished mixing Kristi Falls Behind, the final chapter of The Miller’s Ghost. Now it’s online, completing the story. I’ve been so consumed by this project over the past three months that I’m having a little trouble adjusting to life without having the piece to work on. It’s the sort of feeling I used to have at the end of each semester in college. Read the rest of this entry »
As it turned out, Steve and the Attic, the third chapter of The Miller’s Ghost, was much more difficult to produce than either chapter 1 or 2. It wasn’t any longer, and probably used fewer individual sound effects, and certainly had a lot less music. It only had four characters in it, and I’d already made the mix decisions for three of them back in chapter 1, since Laurie, Steve and Spieler were still in the living room. Where the first two chapters almost always had some kind of sound bed going on (crowds, rain, river, etc.), chapter 3 was often rather still. Read the rest of this entry »
Not really – I wasn’t born until the seventies. But my dad was. He began playing guitar in the late fifties, and by his senior year of high school in 1964, his band was playing at parties nearly every weekend.
Coincidentally, one of the first scenes of The Miller’s Ghost takes place at a house party in 1964. I didn’t want to have to worry about the expense and legal hassle of licensing a hit song from that year to help set that scene. So who better to play at Spieler’s house than my dad’s band? Read the rest of this entry »
The first installment of The Miller’s Ghost is just days away. I’m grabbing every spare moment I can to assemble the hours of raw recordings I have into something that resembles the piece I’ve been hearing in my head. It’s tough to find those moments, since during the week I’m only able to work while my baby is napping, and that is often just 45 or so minutes at a time. Still, little by little, it’s coming together.
Editing the performances hasn’t been too hard. During the recording phase, I used the technique that served me as a music producer. I have a different colored pencil for each take (blue for Take 1, red for 2, green for 3, purple for 4. Hopefully 4 takes is enough!). I write the time each section begins into the margins of my master script, and circle it when I know I got what I wanted. When I’m ready to edit, I can see at a glance which audio file to use, jump right to that spot, and select that portion of the audio. Read the rest of this entry »
Friday night is the culmination of four weeks of recording for The Miller’s Ghost. Marketplace Productions, my employer back in the days before I became a stay-at-home dad, was kind enough to allow me to use the Frank Stanton Studios in downtown LA. I’ve been there for eight hours each of the past four Saturdays, bringing in just about every available member of MTC to give voice to the characters I created.
The four narrators are played by myself, Jon Cohn, Myron Davis and Amy Schloerb. We each had several pages of narration to get through, so I scheduled two to three hour solo sessions for each of us. For the dialogue scenes, involving various other actors, I made sure that the narrators changed their position (sitting vs. standing), used a different microphone, and/or changed the pattern on the microphone (easily accomplished with the AKG 414s that now fill the talk studios). Even without any colorations I might add during the mix, this should make our voices sound different between narration and dialogue, which should help the listener as we go back and forth in certain passages.
Today I distributed the final draft of The Miller’s Ghost to the rest of MTC. Here’s how it came together:
While I wrote three songs during my vacation in Oregon, I didn’t so much as open the file for TMG. It was too difficult for me to alter my headspace between composing music and writing a scary story. But with a pod meeting scheduled for the Tuesday night after my return (about 48 hours later) I had to find my way into the right headspace in a hurry. As I recall, I wrote something like 17 pages in that time, completing the first two chapters: The House on the Hill (mainly exposition) and Karl’s Tale (the ghost’s origin).
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I’m in Sunriver, OR this week visiting my wife’s family. It’s a gorgeous setting amidst the pines and meadows of the high desert, and I’m surrounded with good company and good food. Yet I’m making an effort to tear myself away from all that for at least two hours every day in order to work on the musical and the audio play. With so many friendly hands to help out with my baby, this is the best chance I’ve had to bear down and work in many weeks.
Coming into this week, I’ve written a little more than 40% of the ghost story and three songs for the musical. By the time I head back to Pasadena on the 19th, I hope to have at least completed Act One of the musical (four more songs) and finished a complete first draft of The Miller’s Ghost. It’s an ambitious workload, but I’ve got large amounts of the work pre-composed in my head, and I always work best when I’ve got a deadline staring me in the face. Read the rest of this entry »
written June 4th, 2009
This Monday I played the recording of my teacher’s ghost story for a few Company members. In its original form, it has three parts: one taking place around 1900, one in 1963, and the other in 1964. These amount to a story within a story within a story. I intend to add a fourth part, set in the present. I have only the loosest idea of what will happen there. Through discussing the piece, it has become clear that the story works because of the first person perspective in which it is told. Rather than have all the parts told by one master narrator, I will give each of the four parts to an eyewitness of those events, putting all of them in the first person. Read the rest of this entry »
This year I made three creative resolutions:
I don’t know where I’d get the money to actually produce an album, but the other projects are underway, thanks to the good folks at Mutineer Theater company.
After “Lie with Me” wrapped up, I got the ball rolling on the musical, which we have given the working title of “Prom Night!” My good friend, Kenneth, has had the idea for this show for some time, and only needed some teamwork and structure to begin fleshing things out. We met for an afternoon this spring to outline a two-page treatment, which we presented to a group of MTC members. They were very enthusiastic about the concept. Read the rest of this entry »
