Orchestral Tracks

The Sonata for Orchestra, written in 1983, was a piece I wrote when I was just getting interested in writing and recording.  It was originally played on a Roland Juno 60 synth, back when DAWs (digital audio workstations) didn’t exist yet (that would be starting around 1985).

The original recording was played part by part into a 4-track cassette recorder, without a click track. By the end of the piece, I recall it was a rhythmic mess!  But that’s the best I could do at the time.

That recording is lost now to time (probably rightly so), so I recently programmed a mockup in my studio.  The original score did not include any brass, so I added some new parts.

So, after lying in a box in my studio for 42 years, the Sonata now makes its public debut!  I must say it’s not bad for my first orchestral composition at the age of 20.

The String Quartet #1 goes back more than 40 years to my time at UCLA.  It was composed as part of the requirements for my master’s degree.  I remember struggling with it as it didn’t jive with my musical sensibilities at the time.  Not long after that, I decided to leave the program (foregoing the master’s degree, which I didn’t deem relevant to what I wanted to do – wrie music for film and TV) and venture out into the real music world.

In 2025, I programmed a mock-up of it as the original string quartet concert recording was lost to time, plus I remember the performance being somewhat of a disaster!

The hardest part was recording the viola parts, which were written in alto clef, and I really struggled to play the right notes!

I was pleasantly surprised to finally hear the composition! 

The Woodwind Trio Theme and 3 Variations also goes back more than 40 years to my time at UCLA.    I’m not sure the woodwind trio ever got a performance – if it did, it was not recorded.  This is a recent recreation of the trio.

Three Days is a track composed in 2025 as a way of working through my thoughts on an upcoming back surgery, which was going to last three days, hence the title.  I wanted to do a quasi-Broadway type track with a female singer.  The vocalist is not a real singer but was produced using Synth V, a fantastic vocal plugin.  Hard to tell, isn’t it?

This arrangement of Rogers and Hammerstein’s My Favorite Things was part of a package of three spots produced for a series of Mitsubishi ads.  We recorded both :30 TV and :60 radio versions with a 40-piece orchestra in a great studio in LA; this is the longer radio version.