SCOREcast 2011 Holiday Deal Guide

The holidays are here, and there’s a plethora of deals and discounts floating around the Web for composers. Here’s our list of the best ones, constantly updated with links and details!

SCO Session: Music Editing AVATAR

A discussion with the music editing team behind the biggest movie of all-time, James Cameron’s AVATAR.

You’re Not Ready

You’ve been told you’re talented. You just graduated music school. You have your plane ticket. You’re gonna be famous. Not so fast, Johnson.

SCO Session: 2011 NAMM Wrap-Up

Deane and Brian reflect on the 2011 NAMM Show in this special podcast episode.

2011 NAMM: MOTU and ADAM Audio

SCOREcastOnline.com’s Brian Ralston and Deane Ogden visit with MOTU and ADAM Audio at the 2011 NAMM Show.

James Semple: 2010 Tech Roundup

Although some have the luxury of working with live musicians, samples are a reality for a great many composers. Let’s look at some trends that took root in 2010.

SCOREcast 27: The Long Winter

Deane Ogden and Brian Ralston co-host an edition that is so crammed with new goodies you’ll forget all about the fact that we’ve been in hiding for 10 months!

Tools for Studio Organization

Today’s composer needs to be balanced as a businessperson and writer. Here are some tools to help keep it all running smoothly.

Spotting from the Cheap Seats

***Note — What started out as an article about the role of assistants in the spotting process turned out to be a little more than that. I’ll cover some aspects of spotting from a composer assistant’s perspective, but you’ll find more of an overarching description about what assistants should and shouldn’t do overall in this particular column. End disclaimer. ;-)

When you assist a composer, which I have spent the majority of my time in LA doing, it’s hard to get excited about the “spotting session”. It is only on Spotting Day that I know several things are about to take place for me: I’m going to be fetching a hell of a lot of coffee and I’m going to repeating the phrase, “Can I get you anything else?” a whole helluva lot, too.

More Bits, More People

Seems like there are a lot of ways to spend your money these days, often more money than may be coming in. What are the right choices to move your career forward? Here are a couple of contrasting ideas, both worth considering in their own context. More bits To start with, here I am wearing my “technical guru” hat. Let’s review some things about digital and computer audio; there’s a new technical trend and product you should be aware of. You probably know that digital audio, in the files we create and the way in the signals can flow from one piece of equipment to another, can be in a variety of different sample rates…

The Brightest Light In The Room

I’m sure you’ve had this experience: you go to a party, a meeting or seminar, or maybe just an informal gathering of people — friends, work colleagues, folks out in the world. Inevitably there is one person there who stands out, the center of attention, clearly the most confident, smartest, most successful. How did this person get to be that way? Blessed with talent, charisma, and brains, they go through life winning every game they play… it seems. If you are one of those people, congratulations. But what about the rest of us? How can we hope to compete and succeed in their world, maybe even become a bit like that someday? Let’s take a…

SCO at NAMM: EWQL Hollywood Strings – The Wait is [Sort Of] Over

Many of you have been watching the countdown at EastWest’s www.soundsonline.com in anticipation of the newest “premium” string library to hit the market: EWQL’s Hollywood Strings. Put together with the help of legendary film scoring engineer Shawn Murphy, Hollywood Strings has been billed over the last several months by EastWest as the “a must have compositional tool for serious composers”. As the public date of release approached, however, EW continued to slide the release schedule ever later, resulting in what appeared to be several missed internal deadlines. The wait is finally over. Sort of. While the library still does not ship for another month, you can catch a glimpse of Hollywood Strings running on the…