Life in Edinburgh Part II
Dear Readers,
It has been quite an eventful month since my last blog post. Let me get you all caught up to speed.
The premiere of Stella Green’s original play “Ezra” went beautifully. The cast did such an incredible job, the reception from the audience was terrific and we even got reviewed by a few publications! You can read one of the reviews here. I also got some lovely comments on the score after both performances. Stella Green wrote such a beautiful and moving play, and it was a true honor to be a part of this lovely production. You can hear my full score for Ezra on by Soundcloud by clicking here.
I have had two scoring sessions over the last month, both for Lucy and Max Nebeker’s next short film “The Angler”. The first was a string session, with nine brilliant musicians. We had three violins, a viola, four cellos and a bass. We recorded in Reid Concert Hall, and had a twelve mic set up. There were spot mics on each string player and also a decca tree above me the conductor. It was a fast-paced and fun session. I wrote over 300 measures of string music for the film. We recorded some specific cues to picture while also recorded smaller sections of other cues separately so I could loop and layer them in post. One particular cue really stuck with me. I wrote it the day before the session, quite quickly, mostly because it gave me the chance to develop this particular theme in a way I had always heard in my head. So I wrote a 2.5 minute piece, and when we played it in the session I got goosebumps. Fast-forward to when I was crafting the score in my computer, and I decided to place that cue near the end of the film and it matched up absolutely perfectly.
The second session was for a solo pianist, and we recorded about seven minutes of music for the film. All of the cues were scored directly the picture. We had a two mic set up for this session, pointed at the top third and bottom third of the piano’s strings. It was such a pleasure to record on a Steinway Grand in the Reid. The piano sound fantastic in the score.
The music for “The Angler” is almost complete. It has been one of the most creatively exhilarating projects I have worked on in my career. It represents a mixture of live recorded strings, piano, flute (by me) as well as field recordings and various other live recorded sounds. Everything in the score is recorded live minus on very low synthesizer.
Finally, I’ve been updating my website recently. Do check out my score for Ezra (linked above), as well as my music for a Penn Abroad video series called “Intersections Abroad”, and my music for the silent film “What a Night!”, which we recorded live in Reid Concert Hall in October. I also released on my Soundcloud a live piano performance that I did of an original score for a scene from the classic 1920 silent film “The Golem: How He Came Into the World”.
I hope everyone is having a lovely start to their December, and as always thank you for reading.
Your’s Musically,
Nicholas Escobar
This was the set up for the string recording session for “The Angler”. You can see the spot mics for each musician, and the decca tree above the conductor stand. We also had headphones for each musician and myself so we could conduct to a click track.
This was our set up for the piano session. Two mics pointed directly into the piano. We routed those through my own Focusrite interface, which was hooked up to my computer.