What's Happening: Week of September 10, 2018

I'm back from seeing my son, daughter and beautiful granddaughter in Utah, and am ready to get back into the swing of things.

New this week is a project I think I mentioned a few weeks back. It's a 60-minute ambient soundscape I created for Danita in the hope of helping out with her tinnitus. It combines white noise with water sounds, bird calls and some sampled synthesized music, plus a few odds and ends thrown in. The working title was "Environs," but I've decided to call it "Sanctuary" instead. It's available now on YouTube.

My featured stock music item this week is Corporate Podcast Intro 9 (15 Second). It's a straightforward, upbeat opener for business friendly podcasts and similar content. I hope you'll check it out.

Finally, a little more rumination. After taking a good long look at the data, I've come to the conclusion that my social media efforts have been, at best, marginally helpful in promoting my work. Therefore, I plan to change my strategy to focus more on promoting collections and my artist pages rather than individual items. I'll continue to plug individual items that sell. I also think I'd like to do more writing (as in essays/non-fiction), so I'll probably start spending less effort on social media to accommodate that. Also, I'm not really sure I want to release any more new music outside of the stock realm. It just doesn't seem worth it, at least not in the near term.

But, I've been known to change my mind . . .

What's Happening: Week of August 13, 2018

First, the usual stuff...

My featured stock music item this week is Positive Perspective. It's another one of those simple, pleasant background tracks for presentations, explainer videos and the like.

The podcasting project I was talking about over the last couple of weeks is temporarily stalled. I hope we can get it off the ground and start production this week. (Fingers crossed.)

I think I may have mentioned at some point in the past an idea to take some of the stuff I never released and put it out someplace under the banner of "Lost Decades." I've been going through some of the stuff I had from the 2000s and punched them up a little bit. So I plan this week into getting ASCAP clearance to exempt Bandcamp from publishing royalties so I can put them out there. Assuming all goes well. I also envision doing the same for stuff from this decade and the 1980s. I'll give further updates as I go.

I also intend to work on some new podcast intros, this time in the "lifestyle" or society/culture category, and maybe some other things as well.

Now I want to give a quick mention to the new video I uploaded to YouTube for my recent stock music item Realize The Dream. If you haven't seen it, please check out this blog post. It features a looped animation of my logo spinning on a 3D globe. I like it, but it was quite a hassle to put together. Let me explain...

I saw a bit of information about Microsoft Paint 3D having a new feature. It now allows you to save your projects as simple animations. Sounded great! So I spent some time figuring out how to create one. First, I was able to import a copy of my logo and make it a sticker. That was actually pretty easy.

Where it got tricky was getting the animation right. First I had to fix it so the canvas would not appear in the animation. Making the canvas transparent was not enough; I had to hide the thing entirely. I would have thought making the canvas transparent would have done the job, but no. Not very intuitive.Then there was a lot of playing to get the globe centered correctly. How did I know it wasn't centered? My logo wobbled! After some work, I got that resolved.

Saving it turned out to be a hassle too. The first time I tried to save it to MP4, Paint 3D crashed! I restarted Paint 3D and was able to save it successfully. However, it changed the dimensions of the video to something different than the original dimensions of the canvas (why? beats me!) so that when I tried to import it into Mixcraft 8 Pro to to add the music and text, it was very slow. When I tried to drag it across the timeline to loop it, Mixcraft crashed.

After having that happen a few times (Grrrr....), I remembered that I have some video software that I rarely use. I imported the MP4 file into that and exported it back out to Windows Media (WMV) with 1280-by-720 resolution. I was then able to import that into Mixcraft and it worked like a champ. I hope Microsoft will continue working on the animation to improve, because I do think the results were pretty neat in the end. It beats just looking at a static logo for three minutes.

And that's all I have for now. I hope you have a terrific week, and thank you for stopping by.

Realize The Dream: Royalty-free Stock Music

Here's the video for my new stock music item "Realize The Dream." I plan to go into detail later about how I came up with the animation, so please stay tuned. In the meantime, enjoy.

If you like it, it's available to license now at MotionElements.

Just Uploaded New Video: Humans

I've just uploaded a new video to YouTube. The title of the video is "Humans." Like "The Man in the Arena" that I uploaded earlier this year, "Humans" is spoken word with original music. Unlike "Arena" though, the words as well as the music are entirely original.

The text of "Humans" is based on the psychological concept of cognitive behavior theory. Basically, we're bombarded daily with messages trying to manipulate our behavior by appealing to our emotions. Much of our attitudes toward the world have been influenced by these messages that we've absorbed from childhood on, and often don't think to question as adults.

We learn myths about ostriches hiding their heads in the sand or frogs slowly boiling in a pot of water as the heat is gradually turned up, and maybe never stop to ask "Wouldn't the ostrich have to come up for air?" or "Wouldn't the frog just jump out when it got uncomfortable?" More often than not, these myths are based on things that humans often do -- and don't have to.

My Stock Music in a National Geographic Video

This YouTube video from National Geographic makes prominent use of my track "Ambient Shifting" to support their presentation on using 3-D printing for rapid design and testing of drones.

New DDLY Dynamic Delay from iZotope

iZotope has just released a new delay plugin. It's an interesting piece of software with a lot potential, especially for folks like me who like to do atmospheric types of things with our music. It's available to download for free from iZotope's website (registration required) until March 10, 2016. After that, you have to pony up $49. I downloaded it, installed it, and slapped together this video demo showcasing just one of DDLY's capabilities. Hope you find it useful. (By the way, the track playing here is one of the candidates for my next album project.)

Hudetz Brothers Video Gets "Corporate Energy"

It's extremely gratifying when I actually get to see some of the cool things people do with my music.

Robo Drummer

A researcher at Georgia Tech has come up with a cool invention for disabled drummers.

Elegant Romance for Valentine's Day

Here's one of three tracks in my portfolio with a romantic theme for Valentine's Day. "Elegant Romance" evokes the lush style of the mid-20th century and would make a great musical background for your Valentine-themed audio or video production. It's available in 30 and 60 second versions.

Add "Elegant Romance" to your stock music library today!