Rick Reifenstein

As we head into one of my favorite months; I started thinking about last year during October I was up to my faders in horror music. Director/Producer Gary Streiner was putting together a video montage for the 2008 Living Dead Festival in Evans City and asked me to compose some music for it. The video was made up of previously unseen photographs and posters from the movie. We were working long distance and had many late night Skype chats as I composed the music. As with many projects it came down to the wire. He was dealing with getting time in the post house to put the video together as well as new material coming in that he was hoping to shoe horn into the video while I was composing. Usually notes to me were..."Sounds great , but I need a couple more seconds cause we added a new photo to that section" or "We need to shorten the music under the titles because the program doing the titles only has one damned speed!" Gary was great to work with and enjoyed talking sh...

Before I give an update on projects in the studio I want to talk about Isao Tomita. When I tell Electronic Music students today that he is one of my major influences they always ask "Who?" It surprises me how many people don't know this man. His albums I think are just as important as Wendy Carlos. Maybe more so. He didn't just redo the classics with a synthesizer he arranged the pieces for synthesizer and used sounds that ONLY a Moog can make. I used to sit for hours reading the back of my fathers LP's, memorizing the list of equipment Tomita used. It's where I started my electronic music self study and research. What other 12 year old would know what a Bode Ring modulator does. Or that a Roland Space Echo was a must have item. Thanks to Mr. Tomita I did. His human voices singing were other worldly. His strings lush. His music is the stuff of fantasy. I found a few videos of him working in his studio and I was like a kid meeting his favorite superhero. He is...

OK so before someone says "That's not really revolutionary!" I'd like to qualify that the goal was not to spend extra money with new sound cards. The idea was to use my existing 2 systems; one Apple based and one Windows based and get them working together with Logic as the master program. The result was using my master keyboard controller as the link. Logic sends MIDI information out to the keyboard through USB then the keyboard passes the information to the Windows box running a VST host by using a regular 16 pin MIDI cable. The audio from the Windows box them comes back to the Mac running Logic and records it on an audio track. The result is I can continue to write using MIDI whether I'm using an Apple past softsynth or a windows based softsynth. I now have the best of both worlds; with Logic Pro as the center of the sonic center of the universe. I gave the previously mentioned set up a test by writing a new cue for the next set of cues for Jingle Punks. I crea...

I've been pretty busy lately. I got an email from Justin at Jingle Punks last Friday that gave me some direction for future music. The Punks will be pitching my music to the History Channel and other clients who are looking for dramatic, and moody music for upcoming shows and promos. So Justin was letting me know more of the dramatic moody stuff from me would be great. Since the weekend was a holiday weekend and family was in town visiting; I didn't get into the studio till Tuesday. This weeks studio session were more about experimenting with set up rather than actual recording. Although actual recording did happen; it happened purely by accident as I was trying different systems, and blowing dust off of others. I have two complete recording set ups from different era's. I have a Windows set up with tons of software and hardware to match, but it's from 6 to 10 years ago. I also have an Apple rig put together just last year, but it's a mobile laptop based rig. So I...

This weekend my Dad and Stepmother came to visit for the weekend. A nice 3 day weekend given to us by Labor Day has developed into a great time! As always great food and drink appeared. Dad and I had some quality time together watching the movie "Les Paul Chasing Sound". We had several long conversations about the film industry. (Dad was film editor during the 70's and early 80's) Now that I've been writing cues for film,TV, and games, we talked a lot about music libraries of old and what as an editor he would look for in music cues. On Sunday he and I went to a golf course located on the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains and killed the afternoon with 18 holes of scenic golf. I didn't do too bad being that golf like twice a year. They leave today sometime after lunch. I will probably go into the studio this evening for a while. I got an email from Justin and Jingle Punks on Friday asking for some dramatic moody cues for some upcoming History Channel shows as wel...