I had a music jam today with my friend Gustavo. He is multi-talented and plays many instruments. Today he brought along his violin.

You can grab the Mp3′s we made here, or use the players below!

Minor Swing (folk music style swing tune with violin and piano)

Upbeat Evil Castle
(violin, synth (i)pad, synth bass, Latin drum samples)

Please note that Upbeat Evil Castle has been agreed on by the composers Gustavo and Geoff to allow Geoff to use the song in his videos on Geoffmobile.com and Youtube.com/geoffmobile.

Tetris Theme played on Violin with piano, and some Gypsy songs improvized.

Pizza

I saw a post on the imeem home page about an electronic pop band called Owl City (which, incidentally, is really popular: their Myspace page has over 12 million views).

Adam Young from Owl City has put together a music playlist on imeem entitled “Music To Eat Pizza To”, and I think this is a fantastic idea!

Click here to visit imeem to listen to full playlist (with full length songs, free account required), or you can preview the songs using the player below.

Look out for my next original composition having to do with pizza, or maybe even sushi (coming soon, Geoff Peters: “Song to Eat Sushi To”).

This is simply amazing. Lithuanian conductor and composer Mindaugas Piečaitis found videos on Youtube of a very talented, musical cat, Nora the Piano Cat and decided to write a concerto for her.

The concerto, called CATcerto (web site) was first performed by Nora and the Klaipėda Chamber Orchestra in Lithuania on June 5th 2009. The world premiere is available on Youtube (or by using the player below).

It is quite a musical feat to conduct an orchestra along with a cat! Piečaitis writes:

The problems of the performance of this atypical piece became clear during its first rehearsals. It is not very easy to guess what the cat is playing, so that the video material must be studied very closely and be oriented in the accompaniment not only by what the soloist is playing, but also by the movements she makes beforehand. This became a particular challenge for the orchestra.

Nor was it simple to rehearse the nearly minute-long prelude to the piece, in which the main themes of the piece are presented, with the soloist calmly sitting at the piano and »waiting« for her entrance cue. If I started the piece just 3–4 seconds too early or too late, it would be impossible to avoid a collapse. This risk truly raises your blood pressure.

Video material does not »breathe«, so that you cannot exchange a glance with the soloist and must unconditionally adapt to her.

Nora the Piano Cat writes in her artist’s statement:

I would like to thank Mr Piečaitis for giving me the opportunity to show the entire world that a cat concert pianist can indeed play beautiful music with an orchestra. It is the mission of every great artist like me to inspire others to create. If I have inspired even one person to write music, or learn an instrument, than I will have lived a meaningful life.

I love this video – it is musically interesting, beautiful, and very creative and inspiring.

I had a fun afternoon playing around with my synthesizer (Korg MS-2000) and composed/recorded a new song. It is called Afternoon in New York.

Afternoon in New York by Geoff Peters
Listen:

Download the song (free): Mp3

It features a really simple hip-hop style bass drum/snare (thanks to the Garage Band Hip Hop Synthesized drum kit and a bit of dynamics compression), a synthesized choir patch from my Yamaha P90 keyboard, a soft pad from the Korg, a few notes of an acoustic piano patch from my Yamaha, and a lead synth line from my Korg (with a bit of cutoff filter controlled during the performance to vary the tone). I recorded all the tracks in layers, live & individually along with a metronome. I also used a Volume automation envelope to vary the volume of the lead line and the choir patch.

I don’t know very much about mastering, but the track sounded pretty good on my Macbook laptop speakers, my Behringer studio monitors, and my Creative Labs computer speakers.

Hope you enjoy it! And please let me know your comments, I would really appreciate them!

I am happy to announce the release of the music video for the song Quiet Night by my band, the Geoff Peters Trio.

The song is from our album Quiet Night (which is available worldwide from iTunes and CDBaby).

Feel free to watch below or on Youtube.

The band is:

Geoff Peters piano
Mark White bass
Greg Murray drums

For more info about the Geoff Peters Trio check out our web page.

The music video was shot in Vancouver, BC, Canada and produced by Christopher Lacroix.

Quiet Night was mixed and mastered by Alan Wong Moon. The Steinway piano tuning was done by Yonatan Torn. Video also available on Vimeo.

I wrote a short tune this evening – it’s more like a sketch or vignette, and it’s called “Ol Creeper”.

Hope you enjoy it. I was in a pretty mellow mood when I wrote this song!

Watch: On Youtube

Listen: In Mp3, Midi

Learn: PDF Lead Sheet

or use the embedded player below.
Cheers,
Geoff