Day 37: Preparing for Guitars

I stayed inside all day again today. I had a lot of writing to do, and I'm pretty sure no one was in the studio today anyway with the main title for Law and Order: LA done and the new SVU episode not coming until tomorrow. I spent the day working on my whaling main title. It's very complex and has a lot going on but by dinner time it was finished, save for the guitar part that Brandon will be recording on thursday. I must say that this piece of music may be my favorite thing that I've ever written.

After dinner I started on the next piece that requires live guitar. This one is giving me a challenge. The story behind it is it's the 1950's in the heartland of America. A little boy is growing up on a farm with his family and life is good and simple. Then he's diagnosed with childhood leukemia and his life is turned upside down. Thankfully he goes into remission and he has a new outlook on life. This is supposed to be more like a miniseries or a made for TV movie, but the trouble I'm having is that the story isn't really something you'd turn into a series requiring a main title. TV movies don't have main titles, they just have the opening sequence. That's usually a long segment with time for the music to develop. With this, I still only have one minute that I'm allowed to write and I have to tell the story of this boy's life, then developing cancer and then coming out of it. The story itself is a long, evolving story so making a short piece of music out of it (in my opinion) is extremely difficult if not impossible. Even movie trailers have more time. So I came up with a minute long idea. I did the sketch just using piano. This piece needs to be simple in its themes and execution so I'm staying with just the piano for now. That's enough for Brandon to record the guitar part too. I figure once I have that, I can build from the guitar, rather than write this piece of music and try to find a place for the guitar to fit in. Hope it works.

Other than that, I'm really loving this main title experience. When Mike first told me I had a week to do 5 main titles, I freaked out because that's pretty much a day for each one. When I start a new piece of music, it can take me days sometimes just to come up with my theme, but then I realized it's because I didn't have a guideline to start with. By Mike giving me the synopsis of each title, it got my mind thinking about what each one would sound like, and I was able to move quickly. It was amazing. And these titles are so different from one another that I get to use rare instruments and sounds I don't normally think to use, and I feel like having these will show potential bosses that I'm a well rounded composer.

So tomorrow I have my meeting at BMI and then I finish my titles to prepare for thursday. A lot coming up so I need to focus.