Sarah’s first professionally produced album, Soul of the Machine, was released last week! This was indeed one heck of a ride with professional orchestras and chamber groups all over the world recording some of her best compositions under the watchful gaze and mastering of Navona Records.
The album comes with full copies of the scores so you can follow along with the music, and can be purchased on Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, and Classics Online. If you’re a fan of streaming music services, you can listen to the album on Spotify and Rdio too.
I’m a fan of music, of course, but I’m also a fan of great arrangements. Taking an existing piece of music and changing its style and instrumentation, while still maintaining the soul of the original, is quite fun. What makes an arrangement different from a cover tune? Great question! Listen to this arrangement of Pompeii by Postmodern Jukebox while you read the rest.
As you’re probably noticing by now, it’s still Pompeii, but the style and instrumentation is very different. When your local bar band performs a hit song almost exactly like the original, maybe with a different solo and in a different key, it’s a cover tune. But this, what you’re hearing right now with Pompeii, is an arrangement. I have enjoyed writing arrangements in the past, though the only ones that I have ever really put online so far are my instrumental and electronic Iris arrangements, but the folks in Postmodern Jukebox are masters, and I’m always amazed by their work.
If you’re looking to treat yourself to some great music this weekend, you can buy Postmodern Jukebox’s music on iTunes and Google Play, listen to new tracks weekly in their YouTube Channel, listen to everything on Spotify, and fund new arrangements on Patreon.
I was previously using Superhero on this blog. I really liked the design, and I had customized it quite a bit. Well, call me crazy, but I’m really starting to like large, readable text. I wear glasses, and I can see quite well, but I really enjoy reading when I can comfortably lean back in my chair and read what’s on the screen without squinting or leaning forward. While I loved what I made under Superhero, I was never happy with the text size, and the design itself just looked odd with the text boosted to comfortable levels.
Ryu is a gorgeous, minimalistic, and simply huge theme. I really hope that you can lean back and comfortably read this, because I sure can. Besides simply being designed for large text, Ryu is a single-column theme, so you have no distractions off to the side. As a blogger, I love sidebars. As a reader, not so much, so I decided that it was finally time to let go of the sidebar. Instead, you can find my widgets tucked away in Ryu’s super-handy top navigation panel. Plus, Ryu does this rather fascinating trick with the background colors of image posts, which are automatically selected to complement the image. Go ahead, check out my image posts, but please come back.
Music mashups are magical things which combined two or more songs into one. It takes a real artist to create a mashup that sounds like it should have actually been a performable piece at some point, especially when combined two entirely different styles, and Master of Doin’ It by Wax Audio is no exception.
Master of Doin’ It combines Master of Puppets from heavy metal legend Metallica with Doin’ It from jazz legend Herbie Hancock into a magically smooth yet edgy masterpiece.
