Contemporary Writing & Production

Inspired by the last interview with Chester Bennington (Linkin Park, Stone Temple Pilots) before his suicide July 20th, 2017

DEMONSTRATION OF:

• Original songwriting
• Chillhop production in and out of the triple and duple feels (drums mainly)
• Ambient bass lines with no downbeat
• Use of one shots, stems, loops, programming and live analog recording (vocal and acoustic guitar)
• Video Production

"MY BEAUTIFUL STAR" By Nancy Roché & Tom Frazee , © Feb 2018

Programed and recorded at Admagination Creative Studios / All programming and sound design by Tom Frazee.  Lyrics: Nancy Roché and Tom Frazee. Vocals by Nancy Roché

DEMONSTRATION OF:

• Scoring to Video
• Sound design of EDM stems and loops
• Both beat based EDM and orchestra scoring
• Vocal recording and processing using V-Vocal to "flatten the ambients" for a vocoder type sound
• Use of a video track in my DAW for scoring and syncing.

Once in a life time a project like this comes across the "transom" (sorry for the pun).  As an avid racing sailor, musician, producer and decent video editor, I was asked to pull this together.  This project was a combination of HD extreme sailing videos, massive EDM, rock / orchestral scoring, Latin EDM, girls on a beach in bikini footage...and plenty of research.

Xtreme Cloth (referencing the cloth of the sails and the cloth of the swim suits) was conceptualized by a crazy group of sailing enthusiasts and brought to Admagination for the final production!

Check out the video (Part 1 of 4) and the process used by clicking the "Read More" below.

DEMONSTRATION OF:

• Scoring in Finale
• Programming in a DAW
• Mixing and mastering

"Que Pena" is an original instrumental from Toto Zara's 7th album "Antillano" which features salsa, bolero, cumbia and other styles he wrote durng his tours of his home country of Spain, France (the Latin Quarter) Brazil and New York.  Toto was the youngest of several siblings that became a popular european family group called "Zara"

In 1973, his family had a number one hit with "Eres Tu" one of only 5 foriegn language songs to make it to number one!  recorded under the group name of "Mocedades" (Musical Youth) from Bilbao, it was this song hat brought Toto and his 3 brothers and 2 sisters to America where they eventually settled in Las Vegas.

Toto's father (family name Zaratiegui) founded a nation school of the arts in Tafallia, Spain which today still stand in the town square as a historical landmark.  At the age of 8,  Toto was featured guitarist and flamingo-dancer during public concerts by noted French composer Gilbert Becaud.

Admagination's "10 Minute Choir" actually takes about 30 minutes...truth be told!  Many times we've needed to add the big choir sound to jingles, live production tracks and original songs. Needless to say, we don't have the budget or the room AND we need it yesterday!  This technique uses only 1 female and 1 male vocalist!

SCROLL DOWN for diagrams & score of our technique, and to watch our short, fun video demo!

Here's a short example of productions we've used this concept in: