Rick Reifenstein

After a long, cold, and snowy winter in Central Virginia it looks as if Spring may be around the corner. This weekend’s temperatures are expected to be in the high 50’s close to 60 degrees. For me this year Spring will bring more than sunny days and warmer weather. It is also bringing two student films to score and possible changes in what I do at the University of Virginia. Russ Streiner, currently at the helm at the Pittsburgh Film Office and most famously known as Johnny from “Night of the Living Dead” and one of the producers of the film, has recently contacted me about working with film students at DuBois Business College in DuBois Pennsylvania. The idea is to get young filmmakers thinking about post production audio like soundtracks, not at the last minute but part of the overall planning of the project. On my part it is a great chance for me to make some connects with young and talented filmmakers. Spring is also bringing opportunities to do more work with students and ...

Last night I decided to hook up and power on an old reliable piece of gear that I used very often in the 90’s and a bit in the 00’s. The Roland GR-1. Before purchasing it; I would dream of the many doors this guitar synthesizer would open for me. I had Fripp/Belew dreams. I used it in Prog. Rock, Hard Rock and Industrial bands. However for the last 5 years it has sat untouched until last night. I literally blew the dust off it last night and powered it on. I forgot the rich tones that can be produced and some pretty good imitations of other gear in Roland's rich history. I had to trigger the synth with a midi feed from another keyboard. The GK-2 pickup cable that’s used to connect the guitar has seen much better days and after repeated accidental stepping on the the cable it has start producing many errors and terrible sounds from the synth. A new one will be ordered asap. Soon new pieces of music will be produced using the Roland GR-1 so stay tuned. In other news one of the comp...

Winter is planning it last hoorah last night and today here in Virginia. Snow and ice are expected. I was planning on staying home today anyway. Staying home and enjoying a 3 day weekend with the wife and kids as well as some time in the studio/office will nice. I had a late night session last night til around 2 am. Finished up "Reflections of the Soul". I was having a real tough time finding the right synths and the right sounds, but was able to settle on something deep in folders of Kontakt. I also had some success with a little known simple but spot on synth called A Synth. Ran A Synth through Guitar Rig on the "Tomita Rig" patch I wrote which worked very well. I'm gonna have to remember that. There is a lot of my time that is being scheduled for non-music projects in the coming spring. My work at the University of Virginia, Harrison Institute will be keeping me busy in the worlds audio/video engineering, and interactive software development. My hope is t...

Today was the first day back at the University after having 14 days off. I wasn't planning on 14 days but with the big snow fall we got in Virginia, I was snowed in for 2 of those days. Of course while everyone in my office was at home; as geeks we checked email, read forums, followed blogs and checked twitter feeds dealing with the latest IT news. So it's not so strange that most of our discussions were about ubiquitous computing, smart homes, tablets, Microsoft Surface and Microsoft's Natal Project. Heck even my meetings today with my supervisors were about Surface and Interactive Computing. Building mobile phone apps has also been put on to my todo list for the new year. All the while visions of the latest Richard K. Morgan novel I'm reading is dancing in my head. In the studio we're still in set up and bug squashing mode. I set up the Juno 106 up and ran it through Guitar Rig3. Only trouble is that the synth is dieing a slow and ugly death. Lot's of digital ...

About a week ago I was asked by another department who was putting together an annual report if I could create a 1 to 2 minute video about my work with Microsoft Surface here at the University of Virginia. So I wrote up a script recorded a voice over and even included some of my own music. I shot the video myself on an inexpensive digital camera and included some still I shot. Since the subject was going to be a Microsoft product; I thought I would put the whole thing together using Microsoft Movie Maker versus iMovie (I hate the new one anyway). Movie Maker was decent enough to work in. It had all the editing and special FX tools you would expect. When I was done I exported it as a High Definition WMV. Here’s the kicker. The department putting the online annual report together asked for the file to be in H.264. Movie Maker only does WMV’s and Flash for YouTube. So I put the movie together in iMovie and saved it as an H.264. The iMove file was pixelated and the audio was full of spots ...

This week as been mostly dominated by computerizing in one form or another. My current projects are surrounding phase II of application development for the Microsoft Surface unit in the “Declaring Independence” exhibit at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collection Library at the University of Virginia. I've been writing code all week. I am also writing and producing a small video about the use of Surface at the University Library. I will also be providing the music. Speaking of music; music production has come to a halt since the studio computer has decided that it didn’t like one of its hard drives. This is at a time when I was all set to finish the latest compilation of music to send to Jingle Punks as well as start to assemble CD for release online through iTunes and other online distribution. That’s the way it goes sometimes. So this weekend will be a continuation of computerizing by reformatting hard drives and reloading software, as well as possible resurrection of my wi...

Yesterday was a day off from the University and a day home in the new studio/office. This was the first full day in the new studio/office. I have noticed being on the main floor of the house meant more coffee consumed during hours spent in the studio/office than normal. HHMMM I think there is a correlation there. :-) Most of the hours were spent working on an arrangement of music for the Library at the University. However it proved too difficult a task for the amount of time I have. During that same time period I have to produce a video showing off the Microsoft Surface installation in our "Declaring Independence" exhibit at the Harrison Institute. I spent the morning putting together the monitoring system and loading some more software on the computer. Mostly yesterday was trying to figure and configure which ever DAW system I was going to use. I have an older Cakewalk Plasma DAW, but it doens't support VSTi's; I also have the latest Reaper DAW. Reaper crashed server...