This October I will be taking the Ducktober cold water challenge to improve my own mental health whilst fundraising to help others improve theirs. All funds raised will go to Waves of Wellness (WOW) Foundation to support their mental health surf therapy programs. I did their Surf Therapy program in Bondi last year to help me with the grief over the death of my parents, and it’s really excellent so I want to support it.
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When I did PSYC1001 & PSYC1002 at The University of Sydney, the lecturers declined to provide sample final exam questions from past years. So, to help my fellow future students, I created a few of my own based on my experience of the subject: (more…)
Sydney University Musical Theatre Ensemble (MUSE) president Daniel Baykitch has responded to criticism that the society’s upcoming 2022 production of Guys and Dolls employs heteronormative gender stereotypes by stating, “Yeah. But it’s hilarious.”
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I’m playing a temperamental gangster thug gambler named Big Jule in Sydney University Musical Theatre Ensemble (MUSE’s) upcoming production of Guys & Dolls, and if the rehearsals are anything to go by it’s going to be REALLY FUN to watch.
Cassy Judy has really upped the stakes with her new EP release titled Seven Ways. As one of the most prolific and soon to be iconic up and coming artists out there, her new release continues to expand on her quirky, relatable style with seven catchy new tracks including six original songs.
(more…)My artistic vision for this work was to create a through-composed track using melodic riffs that came to me while going about daily life and represented how I was feeling at the time. I was partly inspired by Paul McCartney waking up with the early stages of Yesterday in his sleep. I deliberately didn’t think much about traditional compositional structures like harmonic progression, pentatonic melodies or 8/16 bar phrases, so the result is very experimental and relatively unstructured.
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The aim of the Fix The Mix assignment was to remix an existing work using the original stems in order to fix it. We were given four options to make marking fair while allowing for different skill levels in the class: easy, medium, hard, and insane. I chose the insane option: remaking the electronic accompaniment for the end of Exquisite Blood by Damian Barbeler.
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The big day has finally arrived and it’s time to record my Live Loop performance of God Is Smilin’ On You. Most of the performance is spontaneous and improvised, but I had some specific ideas about the start and end of the track, and a few lyrical phrases I really wanted to include.
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I’m pretty happy with the way God Is Smiling On You has come together, but there is something that I feel is missing, and it’s a sense of upper register melodic movement. The original song had a repeated 4-bar synthesiser riff in counterpoint to the 2-bar bass riff, which sounded like this:
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To retain some of the grittiness of The (original) Message and make my remix more sonically interesting, my track needed some “Good Dirt”. I also wanted some continuity so I added a background texture moving through the whole piece that isn’t coupled to the Live Loop scenes.
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