At the end of 2001 I was renting a room in South London and
had started working on some new music for a new purpose. Rachel, my future wife,
prompted the idea of writing music to suit dance education; whereby tracks
would be composed, produced and presented to students of contemporary dance tailored
to meet their examination criteria. It sounded like a good plan to try out, so
I started work on a number of tracks each of which displayed some change of
dynamic - be it tempo, time signature, texture, etc. I acquired various sources
of reference material and started to build up a library of sampled African,
eastern and tribal drum and instrumental sounds, as well as some synth elements.
I put together 12 tracks that ranged from electronic synth to experimental
sample based works covering a fusion of genres. Added to the album were three
tracks I had written and recorded years earlier as S-cape, which had a more
electronic ambient vibe. These tracks made up the first release titled ‘DancesoundsVolume One, Choreography’.
We had a twenty pound note and spent it on some stamps,
jiffy bags and blank CDs. I burned the CDs on my home computer, printing out
the labels and jewel case sleeves, and we put together a flyer with order form
promoting the album and sent it out to a number of schools we had addresses of.
This was in February 2002 and it wasn't long before we started to have sales.
We burned more CDs, printed more labels, sent out more letters and then took
more sales. Rachel started building a database, I was building a website and
soon we were looking for an accountant. By September of that year, we released
a second volume entitled ‘Classwork’, which featured longer tracks structured
around a dance class with music for warming up, footwork, travelling and cool
down. These were more electronic dance based and more akin to the music I had
done as S-cape a few years earlier. We decided to get our CDs burned by a
company rather than do them at home, and we started to use printers for the
sleeve and promo leaflets. The orders built up and the database grew quite
quickly.
Rachel worked on the admin and promotions, including
designing the leaflets and putting together guidelines for tracks. I worked on
the music composition and production, as well as the website. It was a good
team in a modest cottage industry. Volume 3 'Stage Dance' was released in
January of 2003 and contained more classical influences with traditional
instruments and shorter pieces aimed at use for dance festivals and
competitions. I didn't have a strong palette for orchestral and traditional
sampled sounds, so I've never been happy with the tracks on this CD; particularly
since upgrading my sound library in recent years and listening back for
comparison. However, they continued to contribute to incoming sales, and I was
soon working on Volume 4 'Solos & Groups', which, like Volume 1, was aimed
more at choreography use for dance students. It is probably one of my favourites
of all the albums with its wide range of styles and sounds, which was fun to
compose and record.
Volume 5 ‘Dance Drama’ and Volume 6 ‘Percussion’ were
released together in 2005. The former contained tracks with narratives
depicting street scenes, water, the Wild West, spy drama, communications and
machines. These were fun to make as they incorporated a lot of use of my
sampler. For the water tracks (stream, river, sea) I recorded the sound of
water in the garden using the outdoor tap and a bucket. For the Wild West movie
scenes, besides using what sound effects I already had in my sound library such
as gunshots, horses galloping and the sound of wind, I took my minidisc
recorder to a local pub and recorded the punters and background noise of
clinking glasses and chatter. This served as the background for a piece for a Wild
West saloon over which I played a honky-tonk piano track. 'Machines' featuring sampled
printer noises shifted pitch to depict big factory machines, and communication
included my own voice as an answerphone machine and other telephone effects.
For ‘On the Street’, I recorded the sounds of traffic on Oxford Street and then
cut up the samples around the car horn sounds, which I then played and
sequenced as a track.
Great fun to record and put together.
The Percussion album also made use of sampling on a few
tracks. All the tracks used percussion sounds and instruments so there were
drum tracks, chromatic percussion such as xylophones, marimbas, glockenspiel
and use of orchestral percussion sounds only. But I also created my own by
recording sounds made by various kitchen utensils and cutlery, as well as
hitting pots and pans and shaking containers from the spice rack.
We also started to sell music for dance by other composers
on our website. Our promo leaflet had now grown into a catalogue of several
pages, more so when we started to incorporate dance education books.
I recorded another choreography album the following year
called ‘Composition’, which sits as another of my favourites. Ten tracks
blending hip hop influences, with contemporary uses of traditional sounds and
some synth effects. Volume 8 ‘Creative Workshop’ featured a mixture of ambient,
jazz influenced, and some up-tempo tracks that were structured suitable for
different choreographic and class work routines.
Volume 9 ‘Ideas For Dance’ featured more narrative tracks
with music depicting space or time travel, pirates discovering treasure, a
balloon rising and falling, this time based more on musical themes, harmonies,
instruments and styles rather than sound effects.
Volume 10 ‘One Minute Thirty’ provided another challenge as
every track had a duration of one-minute-thirty seconds (which served as the
title), so each had to maintain some form of structure, and a change of
dynamic. This was a mixture of electronic and sampled traditional acoustic
sounds across various genres. Volume 11 was titled ‘Musical Cues’ and each
employed a compositional device as the basis of each track. That could have
been a form such as canon, or a rhythmical device.
We also had started selling digital downloads of the tracks
by adding on a digital store to our
website. This also meant we could sell music on demand. While we had been
providing alternative edits of some tracks on the end of CDs, we started
offering a service where I would edit a track to a required length from a
customer, and make it available as a download only track. Around the same time,
we started providing a music search service where we had dance teachers and
students searching for a suitable piece of music for a performance or
choreographic task in an examination and on receiving an enquiry, Rachel would
select suitable suggestions by referring to a spreadsheet we built containing
data pertaining to each bit of music. The customer could then preview the
tracks and buy the downloads. This proved to be quite a popular tool and gave
us some indication as to what type of music people were after, particularly
when we received requests for similar themes or settings. In some cases I would
compose and produce new music that might fit some requirements ahead of time,
which would then be additions to the catalogue and form the basis of the next
album. In 2010, we released Volume 12 ‘Mood and Atmosphere’ which featured more
cinematic styles of music with an improved sound palette and some new
compositional ideas.
One thing Dancesounds has done over the years is stretch and
challenge me a little when it comes to compositional style, sound selection and
use of form. Instead of always sticking to 4/4 steady rhythms and standard
harmonic structures, I found myself experimenting more with time signatures,
polyrhythms, using timbres in different ways and playing around more with
sampling and creating new sounds.
In 2012, after ten years, we wound the business down, in
part prompted by a house move, a change in circumstances and the quietening
down of CD sales. After 12 volumes of work, plus extra albums of edited tracks,
extra compositions and commissions, we had built up quite a catalogue of
material and a customer base of happy clients.
While a number of CDs are still available through the NRCD(National Resource Centre for Dance), I also put the entire digital catalogue
on Bandcamp. I also released Volume 12 through CD Baby which now makes it
available across various digital outlets and services such as iTunes, Amazon,
Spotify, Google Play, and many many more. The tracks are occasionally played
and sold and I recently set about remastering them all with a view to reissuing
a selection of the albums, as well as preparing them for availability as music
for media by way of a production music library.
This week sees the re-release of albums ‘Composition’, ‘Creative
Workshop’ and ‘Solos & Groups’ which are perhaps my favourite three. These,
along with ‘Mood & Atmosphere,’ now sit on the other digital services
mentioned as well as various others.
Around six years ago, I began editing video footage to a few tracks to give them some life on places like YouTube. I've always been keen to write or edit to visual media, and while I’ve contributed music to a few short films, I never managed to find a foothold in the right place to get any further. So sometimes I just have to make my own and do it myself.
Cracking Codes
Edited video of my trip to Derek Jarman's Garden a few years back.
In all the time we
were selling the CDs we would occasionally get some feedback from students or
teachers who had used our music, but we would never actually see examples of
the combined efforts of each art form; except for one time quite early on when
we were invited to a local school in Tonbridge, who were putting on their end
of year dance performance, using around seven pieces of my music. So it was
quite a thrill to see students perform their choreographed routines to tracks
from the catalogue. A few years later I began doing a few commissioned
arrangements and compositions for stage festivals and competition performances,
which were filmed and sent to me. And more recently I stumbled across a few
tracks that had been posted to YouTube by dance students showing their choreography
routines. So while hearing and seeing evidence of the use of the music has been
minimal, it is very rewarding to see.
Chroma.
My competition entry of a short score to a Wayne McGregor dance video.
Part of the Royal Opera House Create project competition.
It didn't win but here it is anyway.
‘Composition’, ‘Creative Workshop’, ‘Solos & Groups’ and
‘Mood & Atmosphere’ are available in digital stores including ITunes,
Amazon, GooglePlay, and Spotify.
And the full catalogue remains available at Bandcamp.
