Composer Quest: A Songwriting and Music Composition Podcast

In today’s episode of Composer Quest, I interview Noah Keesecker about everything from the perils of grad school to making musical ping pong tables. Along the way, I discover that Noah is on the “spectrum of synesthesia” as he calls it. For example, he often experiences smells when he hears things (bassoons smell like mossy logs), and he strongly associates visuals and sounds, which has led to some really cool multimedia works like Tonegoblin. Noah shares some great tips on being both a creative and professional artist.

Composer and Baroque music specialist Michael Dodds is the subject of an upcoming documentary called Blessed Unrest (currently being Kickstarted) about the personal challenge of creating a 40-minute choral symphony. Michael joined me on Composer Quest to talk about the techniques he used in writing his symphony, like borrowing from the beautiful Romantic harmonies of Richard Strauss. Michael also explains how Baroque composers are like jazz musicians, and how music theory is linked to the history of map-making.

Lisa Walkosz-Migliacio is a video game designer who also specializes in composing sparkly “tingy tingy” music that perfectly complements her games like the cute, bunny-filled Usagi-chan. With about 350,000 downloads of that game, she’s clearly found a niche: young girls who don’t have many games designed with them in mind. In today’s episode of Composer Quest, I talk with Lisa about her creative process as both a composer and game designer. We also get to hear about her first ever game, a floppy-disk Joan of Arc adventure.

Over the past few years, Bob MacCallum has been focused on one question: can music evolve through natural selection? In this episode of Composer Quest, we discuss Bob’s amazing evolutionary music project, DarwinTunes. In the DarwinTunes experiment/game, participants rate and “mate” short sound loops to breed new musical offspring. Although it started with randomly generated sine waves and noise, the evolved sounds are now surprisingly musical. Also in this episode, we talk about Bob’s scientific analysis of over 70,000 Billboard hit songs from the past half-decade, which has revealed three major revolution years in music history: 1964, 1983, and 1991.

Ian Dicke has secrets, but not the scandalous kind. In this episode of Composer Quest, we talk about his tricks of the trade when it comes to structuring his compositions and developing musical ideas. Ian also shares his approach to teaching post-1940s art music, which usually only gets about a week of attention in undergraduate music programs.

Jason P. Schumacher has made a name for himself as a filmmaker in the Twin Cities, but he’s also had songwriting in the background of his life since high school. In this episode of Composer Quest, we talk about Jason’s first official EP, Dumpster Baby, which is kind of a retrospective of his melodies and guitar riffs from his earliest songwriting days. Jason also shares some great advice on freelancing, and we talk about some of our favorite film scores.

Andy Thompson is the guy who’s made Jeremy Messersmith’s albums sound incredibly good. He has also collaborated with Dan Wilson of Semisonic, Belle and Sebastian, and he even added some instrumental parts to Taylor Swift’s record Red, which earned him a Grammy nomination. In this episode of Composer Quest, Andy shares his ideas on arranging strings, mixing pop music, and making generative music.

100 years after the death of Alexander Scriabin, his music lives on in a form he would never have expected. A week ago, I announced the Patchwork Scriabin quest along with UniqueSound, and 49 people contributed to our Scriabin sound quilt by recording a measure of his Prelude in A minor, Op. 11 No. 2. I’m excited to present our final mashup, with 68 uniquely-produced measures. You’ll hear trombones, bells, accordions, chiptune synths, wine glasses, dog growls, dance beats, and much more.

Hrishikesh Hirway removes as much of himself as possible from his interviews with musicians in Song Exploder. In today’s episode of Composer Quest, we get to hear from this mysterious podcaster about his own songwriting process. He also shares what he’s learned from all the talented songwriter guests on Song Exploder.

Film Score Fest is back in 2015! MNKINO and Composer Quest will be pairing up filmmakers and composers to create new short films, and the Composer Quest orchestra will perform the scores live at the screening on August 13th (7pm, Landmark Center in St. Paul, MN).

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Alexander Scriabin’s death, Composer Quest and UniqueSound are teaming up to bring you a collaborative music production quest. We’ll be creating an “audio quilt” based on Scriabin’s Prelude in A minor, Op. 11 No. 2. Your goal is to record one measure from the score using whatever instruments or synthesizers you want (sign-up form below). I’ll unveil our stitched-together masterpiece on the Composer Quest podcast on April 27th.

Roger Dumas was a synthesizer whiz kid back in the 70s. He wrote manuals for early Moog synthesizers, and he helped out Prince, Janet Jackson, and even John Lennon. He’s also the guy behind the catchy synths in the disco hit “Funkytown.” Now Roger has a new passion: studying the brain’s response to music. He’s done some pretty amazing work, including re-creating a melody out of the pure data from brain sensors. In this season premiere episode of Composer Quest, I talk with Roger about his research, his album based entirely on brain data, and his glory days in the music business.

Welcome to this special Christmas episode of Composer Quest! Since I’ll be taking a break from interviews (until I find a few more patrons…wink wink), I thought I’d share a few of my favorite music composition and music production podcasts. If you’ve been listening to Composer Quest, you’ve heard from many of these podcast hosts before.

It was an honor interviewing legendary composer Grant Kirkhope about his time at Rare, where he worked on some of the most popular video game soundtracks of all time. In this episode of Composer Quest, Grant talks about composing within the very small limits of the Nintendo 64 cartridge, and he shares some stories behind the soundtracks to Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie, GoldenEye 007, and Perfect Dark. We also talk about Grant’s more recent orchestral work for Kingdoms of Amalur and Civilization: Beyond Earth, and he shares his favorite chord progressions that keep coming back in his music.

In today’s episode of Composer Quest, I talk with fellow Minnesotan Ben Burnes, who has been writing chiptune music for games (12 games in 12 weeks, as a matter of fact). He just released them in his album Three Red Hearts, and in our talk he shares some tips on creating video game music. We also talk about creativity and the business of indie game composing.