Windstorm

This is a piece with a long history.  I started writing it as a sophomore or junior theory project back around 1998 while I was a student at Indiana University.  We had to write a composition in the style of another composer, and I chose to write in the style of Berlioz's requiem.  However, I was only ever happy with some of the ideas, not the piece as a whole.  By my last year or so at IU, I had already started reworking the piece.  I scrapped the original accompaniment and added the harp line that you hear today.  I even played it on a recital to celebrate my wife's graduation.  One of her friends from the dorm played the harp part, and I recruited another to play a very simple drum line that had not yet matured into what it is currently.  By 2001, I bought a modest recording rig running Cubase VST 32, Wavelab 3, and Gigastudio.  With GigaHarp and some sounds from my Casio keyboard, I was able to get one step closer to my vision.  I still have the recording somewhere, but it sounds so thin and amateur compared to this.  By 2010 and thanks to my job as an Army Musician, I was able to afford a computer powerful enough to run LA Scoring Strings, Storm Drum 2, and other sample libraries that were a huge improvement over what I had previously.  I reworked Windstorm yet again, adding orchestra, an improved drum track, and I rerecorded the sax part with an AEA R84/TRP combination.  The result was so much better, that I was finally starting to be content.  I can't tell you how many mixes I did, though.  It took a couple more years of tweaking here and there before I finally decided to put it to rest.  Fortunately, by that point we had been living in Alaska for a couple years and collected some great pictures.  The slide show contains pictures taken by my wife and myself.  Some were just with my iPad.  The scenery is of Fairbanks, Anchorage, Denali, and Sitka.  I really think they suite the mood of the piece, and I hope you like it too.  I still think about tweaking things sometimes, maybe recording the sax part again, but I've learned that I need to keep moving forward.  There are many new projects to do.  Whenever I watch this, I miss Alaska.  It was a state that I never wanted to visit, but now that I have lived there, I wish I could go back.