Have Some Magical, Musical Heritage!

by Daniel L Rappaport

Please read to the bottom, as there is a surprise!

“Nevertheless the passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.” - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart "Mozart, huh? What a disappointment he was.", complained Morgana. "What were you expecting? You did create him, after all.", asked Lazul.

"I expected him to live longer."

"So did the rest of planet Earth, for the most part!", exclaimed Kabire.

So, for Pazzaria Productions, I do mostly everything. The writing, website design, graphic design, music composition, motion graphics, video editing, legal, run the porn department (kidding), and even terrorize kids every once in a while (also kidding - maybe), etc...

Just about the only thing that I don't do are the gorgeous, hand drawn character and background animation style art that you see throughout.

I don't really tell you this to impress you. I inform you of this, to impress upon you that when a small company is starting out, it's absolutely okay for the founder to wear many hats.

And, as a quick aside... Yes. I have tried to hire this virtual assistant firm (two, actually), or that social media marketing expert, etc...

A big part of the trouble (and you may find this yourself, when running a business) is that by the time you get through explaining what it is that you want, and going back and forth over the assignment for several days, you could've just done it yourself.

Now, as the company grows, I will need to start to hire more and more people to run things.

I digress...

I have always been extremely curious about many different forms of digital media. Even now, I am working on an eBook that will be sold on Amazon. Not only have I never done this before, I am on a quest to see how it will fit back into our forward thinking mission statement. It will be very, very interesting and extremely cool. Do you have a Kindle Fire?!

So, this is a bit of my creative craziness, and, as I said, I also compose music.

I am primarily influenced by classical, world, theatrical, theme park and film soundtrack music. Think Disney, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cirque du Soleil, etc... For me, I like to take worldly influences, and do something a bit different and altogether original sounding with them.

For this music album - Pazzaria Productions - The Beginning, I didn't want to forget some of the seminal works that started the spark of this company. I have main themes, music describing characters and pieces that went along with some early video advertisements.

Again... I haven't really seen anyone else do this, in quite this same way.

I studied both piano and clarinet in my pre high school, high school and college years. As Pazzaria Productions was coming more and more into being, I knew that I had to involve music somehow.

And, so, involve it I did! At the time, Apple had come out with an amazing program called Soundtrack Pro. A strength (and, likely, the first time that this has ever been in a software

package with as wide of a distribution as Apple has) of this is the fact that you could

take several different music tracks, programmed into loops, and have them

all sync up, rhythmically, perfectly, every time.

The idea of loop based music creation and editing was totally new to me. There weren't

any real classes or information on how to do it.

It's just something that I instinctively caught on to, just by the suggestion that it could be done.

Along with many, many other backgrounds, I new how to edit audio. I had been doing it since Sound Edit 16, and even a bit before.

A Travel Through a Town Full of Artists was the first piece that I had ever composed.

After getting into the groove of this (quite literally), I then started to expand my loop library. I must have thousands upon thousands of them, by now.

Today, since Soundtrack Pro no longer exists, and I really don't like Logic Pro, I use Apple's GarageBand for the initial music creation and then throw it into 5.1 surround sound in Adobe's Audition.

Whenever I start a piece, I have a vague concept of what it will sound like, in my head. I then start to listen to samples of loops from all around worldwide orchestras. I collate those into a favorites menu, and then start to craft the piece.

I lay down the loops in the timeline portion of the editor, and just keep doing that until things start to make musical sense.

Along the way, I, of course, adjust necessary pitches, volumes, etc... to create a flowing work.

Of course, I also EQ it.

Once I am happy with the results, I put it into Audition and run the 5.1 surround sound on it.

After that, it's ready for publishing.

Eventually, after having a number of musical tracks, that started to form themselves into albums, I needed to create a music label for it all.

Pixie Dust Records was born!

I am really, really excited for future possibilities, as it pertains to music exploration, innovation and technology!

I have some really wonderful ideas about how take audio and play around with "3D" sound aspects, new ways of surround immersion, as it relates to environmental, attraction and themed design, etc...

I envision this as taking a surround sound panner, and playing with individual speakers, in a live environment (I don't know how else to describe it). It would be tuning each speaker, individually, so that audio will move around in more precise ways, depending upon the situation.

We'll see all of what happens!

If you like, please take a bit of a free listen to Pazzaria Productions - The Beginning. You will thoroughly enjoy it!

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