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J Scott Rakozy

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une autre fois

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Sea Of Love - The National (Cover)

Titanium Piano Instrument by Rai Bagus

Reflections

School has taken over my life. Piano practicing for lessons have taken over my evenings. And the only time I have to compose are on Saturdays and Sundays so I'm sorry I haven't been able to put out any new material. I have some projects underway but due to my schedule it makes it rather difficult to finish any of these ideas and then when I'm busy the idea drifts away.

HOWEVER...I decided it was time to just stick this up there. A personal project of mine is to re-orchestrate some pieces from The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening soundtrack into full symphonic movements. I always wanted to do an orchestral version of Mabe Village because of its simplicity and child-like tune. So I decided to take a shot at it and created this piece. Influenced by other Zelda scores like The Windwaker soundtrack and the Majora's Mask soundtrack and others, this piece only took about a week or so and like traditional video game music I went and just looped it as if it were a score from the game. Anyway, enjoy the piece. Expect more orchestral arrangements of Link's Awakening in the future! I've got a brilliant idea for the boss/nightmare battle that I'm eager to work on and deliver that. Anyway, stay tune for more!

PS: Also this piece was written using EWQL Symphonic Gold and Storm Drum 2 on a 2009 MacBook Pro 13 inch model with a 2.53 GHz with 8 GB of RAM.

Also: Here's the original tune if you wanna compare - 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yii7mhaZqVw

V I D E O G A M E S || The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - Mabe Village

This piece was written in a single night. I was listening to some Jonsi and decided to just sit down and write something out. I haven't been able to do that with school and work eating up my schedule so I went and created this piece. I wanted to keep it simple, upbeat, and short. So there are a few instruments that I incorporated into this piece I haven't done in the past. First instrument is the kick drum from my new EZ Drummer Indie Folk kit from ToonTracks. It's a Ludwig kick drum so it has an incredibly tight feel to it along with the tom that accompanies it. On top of that I also brought in a Dulcimer to bring another tone of a plucked instrument even though a dulcimer uses mallets. The piano is from 8dio called the 1928 Legacy Steinway Scoring Piano. Seriously, if you want a beautiful scoring sound from a piano, definitely grab the 1928 Legacy. Anyway, as for the influence, Jonsi's "Go Do" soundtrack just features an incredible collection of some of the most powerful music out there, namely his orchestration with woodwind instruments, hence the flutes in my piece. Enough talk, go and enjoy!

H O M E

Outta my head M. ward cover

Spoon - Inside Out (Tycho Remix)

Pemberton Music Festival 2015 - A playlist of the artists participating at the music festival.

Depreston - Courtney Barnett

New track from the forthcoming Helios album "Yume" coming Autumn 2015.

KICKSTARTER

Helios - Sonora Lac

A six track EP of cinematic singles. Available for free under Creative Commons for non-commercial use.

Download: http://jamesjoshuaotto.bandcamp.com/album/and-then-the-mountains-moved

License: http://www.jamesjoshuaotto.com/use/#licensing

And Then, The Mountains Moved

Revelation

One Step Enough

What Is Whispered In Your Ear, Proclaim It From The Rooftops

Alrighty so I decided to just take this piece alone out of the Variations on a Spyish theme and make it its own seperate track. Now the that entire process of doing those covers was pretty crazy, especially this one....I paid extreme attention to detail and sounds and how instruments collaborated with one another. To be quite honest with you, this is by far one of the best covers I've done, if any for that matter. And also from an equipment-point-of-view, using just EWQL Symphonic Orchestra Gold, and Storm Drum 2 to create this entire piece, that's quite a feat I must say. Anyway, enjoy it!

V I D E O G A M E S || Metal Gear Solid

So, it's been quite some time since the last piece I've done (The Farmstead), however on my vacation in NY, doing my nightly searches of orchestrated covers of popular songs I stumbled upon a few pieces that were ok......an orchestrated cover of Owl City's "Fireflies" and some others.....the only orchestrated cover I actually was super impressed with was The City of Prague Philharmonic's performance of Coldplay's "Yellow". So I decided to take it upon myself to do a cover of one of my favourite Coldplay songs - Fix You. So after returning back from my vacation, that night I began my project......almost a week later, here it is. So as I always say, this is by far my favourite piece I've done. Everything from the strings to the woodwinds to the brass, everything just kind of meshed well.....Earlier this week, I was in a sticky situation deciding if I wanted to bring in the drumkit and the bass since I had the electric guitar featured, however whenever I tried doing the orchestration on top of it, it just didn't fit well....it wasn't like Metal Gear Solid well....so I had to figure out a different way to make it upbeat and triumphant without the aid of a drum kit......Luckily an inspiration came along and it was all figured out! However the next problem was that progressive triumphant segment.......this is where Coldplay is singing "Tears stream down your face" blah blah blah.....so I had to figure out how to keep the orchestration captivating and yet still endure 32 some odd measures at the same time.....But it was interesting to note that within two days I was able to knock off those 32+ measures....And the of course the ending was another issue to figure out......did I want it to end like coldplay's original? and then I though "Pshh, I'm the arranger, heck no!" So all in all, in a matter of 5 days this piece came to life........I was getting tired of listening to terrible orchestrated covers on youtube and what not so I had to do a cover to prove that you can do a proper orchestra cover on a rock song using a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) like Logic Pro or Cubase or whatever and some proper sample libraries like EWQL or MOTU. So yes, this entire performance is all done on a computer, precisely my 13 inch MacBook Pro with 8 GB of RAM with a 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, using Logic Pro and everything was used with EWQL with a few instruments from the Logic library (the piano and the guitars with some cymbals). Anyway, so some influences......John Williams work on Saving Private Ryan, the piece "Hymn to the Fallen", and also Jurassic Park haha! But otherwise there was no other outside influence for this piece, aside from Coldplay and their melody.....oooh I will mention that Lex de Azevado was an influence for the piano segment when you first hear it trickling down. Other than that, yeah I'm just super impressed that I managed to complete it within 5 days.....anyway, enjoy it, comment on it, suggest stuff, whatever......and also I'll have a youtube video up whenever later this week displaying the massive file in action....ENJOY!

A R T I S T S || Coldplay - Fix You

V I D E O G A M E S || Overwatch Legacy - Free Download

Alduin returns from the dead to the land of Nords.

V I D E O G A M E S || Alduin's Return

So  recently posted up on my facebook the song from the Dead Island trailer. Anyway, so the original song by Giles Lamb is already beautiful enough, so I decided to take the chance to make it a lil' more uplifting and um.......I dunno what other word could describe it....just happier. Anyway, the trailer itself is beautiful. So this piece took me only last night and today. I wanted to stick to the original beginning but then afterwards take it into a J Scott Rakozy kind of direction. Thus it was super awesome and I knew this was exactly how I wanted the piece to go with the triumphant horns, the banging of the drums, the sense of being sent free, liberated and what not. So another influence with this piece was actually from Danny Elfman's work off "Real Steel" the very ending after the major box fight, so the use of the drums with orchestration was what made it into this piece. So using EWQL Symphonic Gold and Storm Drum 2 this is what you can create. The piano was the only thing from the Logic Pro library and also the guitar. So enjoy the piece, I'll get it up on facebook, on soundcloud and a video of it on youtube. So enjoy, comment and do whatever else!

Want all the latest details, check out the blog: http://theinsightfulcomposer.blogspot.com/

Want to check out more music: http://soundcloud.com/jscottrakozy

Want to see videos of projects in motion: http://www.youtube.com/user/jscottrakozy

V I D E O G A M E S || Dead Island

My tenth take of my take on Well It's True That We Love One Another by The White Stripes. Guess Jack White had a thing for overly-long titles.

Well It's True That We Love One Another (Take10) (The White Stripes Cover)

Counting Crows - Mr. Jones

Decided to dust off my old keyboard and give it a whirl.  This is an excerpt of the song Ice Dance from the movie Edward Scissorhands. Written by Danny Elfman. 

Ice Dance (Piano Instrumental Cover)

Alrighty, so this piece was written for a client out in Atlanta, Georgia...hopefully their client likes it as well haha! But I wanted to shared this piece because it was truly a fun piece to write!!! Sure I had less than a weekend to write 8 minutes of music. I wrote up a quick 1:30 demo to them and the director liked it but hadn't heard back from their client as for a green light yet but said I should go on anyway. So Friday, Saturday Night (because of work eating up my entire day) and all day Sunday up until about 3 am and even this morning I was writing this piece....The toughest part about this piece was trying to keep the momentum going for 8 minutes long and still retain that feel and style

When I was first approached about the project, I saw the video and instantly thought of two composers - Hans Zimmer's "Time" and "One Simple Idea" from the Inception soundtrack and also Philip Glass' Metamorphosis album. So I went to town with a simple piano segment which then was introduced to the guitars with their repetitive patterns. The strings were going to be a major factor in this piece as well. I also wanted to add in some electronica elements as well but at a minimum so that the listeners could be sucked into with the strings and piano.

Some obstacles along the way aside from trying to keep the momentum going for 8 minutes was the many modulations and key changes to get to a certain key I wanted. There is a 30 second bit found at 6:03 that frustrated me for a good hour on how to land it in a certain key....the key where the guitar and drums come in. That whole modulating segment took a great deal of time because there were many variations to go but none of them went as smooth as the one you hear.

Some other tidbit information to listen for: at 5:12, the guitar segment there.....I didn't realized it at first because I thought it sounded cool, but those three notes that play there are actually similar to the three notes you hear on the Spiderman cartoon theme haha!!! Also at 6:26, that key change from a G major to a B major was an idea that I had hard on a few Danny Elfman soundtracks.

The drumming found at 6:35 was a lot of fun to do! In the film, it's just clips of a time lapse sequence of downtown Atlanta at night....really cool looking, so to give a feeling of excitement and thrill of downtown I decided to try out this Coldplay kind of feel. It wasn't easy as I'm not a drummer by any means, so I had to figure out what a real drummer could do while I performed the recording on the keyboard haha!!! That last segment is also my favourite due to that sense of accomplishment you feel...I dunno if it's the drumming or the strings or what, but somehow it just feels like this motivation to keep doing the best you can.

Anyway, so there you go! Unfortunately due to this project, it will not be a downloadable piece. But feel free to comment or ask or anything!!! Since this is still being under review, there might be changes needed....if anything I'm assuming the last segment where the drums come in at 6:36. So until then, enjoy the piece!!!

Also check out my youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/jscottrakozy

Also check out my blog as well: http://theinsightfulcomposer.blogspot.com/

Also check out my website (in production): http://jscottrakozy.com/

If you want to ask me about my compositions in how I write them or anything, feel free to send me a message via soundcloud, and for any director or producer wanting to contact me to discuss projects, feel free to contact me as well via soundcloud!

Thanks again and hope you enjoy the piece!!!

~ J Scott Rakozy

T I M E | L A P S E

Alrighty. Well this is just a demo of 8dio's new piano program call "1928 Steinway Legacy". All I have to say is this is the perfect scoring piano for film! The piano itself is just so beautiful and luscious with ambience and reflects what a true scoring piano would like. I know I've been able to mimic this sort of sound with Logic's own piano library using their Steinway piano preset and have a compressor set to "Piano Hard" and play softly, but this just program is just gorgeous through and through. For only $200 bucks, it's definitely worth it! It features quite a bit from the positioning of the mic, to how loud you want the pedal sound to be to numerous morphs of the piano. It's truly a gem! The downside however you have to get Kontakt 4 or Kontakt 5 (the full retail version)....honestly, I just needed the player, and not the additional 40 some odd GB of unwanted sounds...so that's the annoying part.

But anyway, so here's a piano cover of Radiohead's "Thinking About You", and I pieced it together after the styling of Christopher O'Riley. Anyway, enjoy and remember, this is just a demo of the program.

A R T I S T S || Radiohead - Thinking About You

After watching The Dark Knight Rises a second time at the IMAX I had an idea...to do an entire cover of The Dark Knight Trilogy. The simple idea was to implement Batman's theme, Joker's theme, and Bane's theme all into one large piece of work. I started it Friday night and have been working on until today, Tuesday. 

So to break it down, the song is divided as such: The Joker's theme is introduced with the dissonant vibe that was pretty much the entire soundtrack of The Dark Knight. It then switches into the main Batman theme with that triumphant sound. It then later comes to Bane's lovely theme....the theme itself wasn't so much complex because it literally is two notes alternating, but it's the rhythmic pattern that defines the theme.....more so, it's suppose to be the same pattern as the chant from The Dark Knight Rises when Bruce Wayne goes to climb the wall. After that theme, then brings back the familiar tunes of Batman's theme and ends exactly like Batman Begins. 

So writing the music, you'd be surprise that I only used EWQL Symphonic Gold and EWQL Storm Drum 2 for this entire project! The only none EWQL instruments I used were from Logic Pro's library.....the synth bass, the GLAM bass, some rhythmic percussion sounds/electronica sounds and the tremolo strings (with a multipressor). And that's it. I saw a lot of batman covers on youtube featuring Symphonic Gold and other programs but the people doing the sequencing and such didn't really put a lot of effort into shaping the sounds to be realistic sounding....so that's when I go and do this and show off what one can really do with Symphonic Gold and Storm Drum 2 if they just dig a lil' bit and not go and splurge their money on numerous other libraries can do the same effect.

ps...also to note. All written on a 13" MacBook Pro with a 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 8 GB of RAM. Sequenced and Edited in Logic Pro 9 (I upgrade haha!) using EWQL Symphonic Gold and Storm Drum 2 and Logic Pro's own library. Performed on an M-Audio 88es Keystation MIDI controller. All sound was run through an Apogee ONE to a pair of SRH840 studio headphones. All sound libraries are carried on a 500 GB OWC Mercury Elite Pro external hard drive.

So enjoy and share!

Credit goes to Hans Zimmer for original themes
Arranged by J Scott Rakozy

F I L M S || The Dark Knight

Quote by John Piper. 
http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/sermons/why-did-god-create-the-world
http://www.ayoungblog.com/

Adam Young - Billions

my track "Endeavors"

<a href='https://theartistunion.com/tracks/4f388e'>Download for free on The Artist Union</a>

Free Download

MitiS - Endeavors

So here's a rendition of the Super Mario Medley on the piano. I mixed in my own stuff with some of another pianist's work, Andrew Johnson, into this piece. This was recorded on a Zoom HD so hopefully within the next couple of days I'll find some condenser mics and get a high end recording on a lovely Yamaha C7. MIDI keyboards can't quite reproduce the same feel of a grand piano.

I learned the song in one day and practiced it everything up until today where I performed it at some talent show. Anyway, check it out and enjoy!!!

V I D E O G A M E S || Super Mario Brothers - Piano Medley

And here it is, folks! 'Smash' was originally written for my Electronic Music Composition class for my final project. The one thing I wanted to apply as much as possible was this incredible program call "Evolve Mutation 2" from Heavyocity. I needed to branch out and get more involved with incorporating electronic elements with my film scores and stumbled upon this beautiful program to get the job done. 

Mutation 2 has some of the most fantastic electronica sounds you can get for $120. Seriously, all except the orchestral instruments and the guitars and bass are all found within this program. That's right, the beats, the percussion, the electronica instruments and synth pads and everything.......all straight from Mutation 2. I wanted to implement as much as I could but also keep it at the film score level. I'm not as savvy as other composers when it comes to electronica/orchestral fusions, and I've dabbled a lil' but never have I put this much effort into a score to show case this product! It was a lot of fun to compose and definitely stretched my mind in how to portray certain ideas and emotions throughout this piece.

Anyway, enjoy the piece, comment, and download and like! Thanks guys!

S M A S H

Ana 3araby - انا عربى

Heard your voice in my head too soon
Pass girl, say it
It all could come, oh baby make up your mind
Please make up your mind

So we let a stone unturned
Maybe that’s a lesson learned yea
Please make up your mind before it’s too late

I didn’t wish you’d turn that much
That’s where I troll the letter such
Oh baby, make up your mind
Please make up your mind

There’s always more to see but it’ll keep go another day hard
Baby make up your mind before it’s too late

We can’t have the light
It all worked out this time
And everything’s fine now
Please make up your mind
Please make up your mind

But if it’s up, it’s up to me
A much shorter I’ll come see yea
You better make up your mind before it’s too late
Baby make up your mind ‘fore it’s too late
You better make up your mind ‘fore it’s too late

Baby make up your mind 
Baby make up your mind
Oh Baby make up your mind fore it’s too late 

YO LA TENGO - Well You Better

A D E L I N E

<a title="Request license for this Track." href="http://www.tracksandfields.com/track/request_license?track_name=Imagine+%28Finalized%29&amp;user_name=jscottrakozy&amp;from_sc=1">Request license for this Track.</a>So this piece is a song for a promo video for a backpack designed by students at BYU called the Tessel Jet Pack. The idea for this piece was to keep the idea of when you were a kid you used your imagination for everything. So the marimba is to give way of the idea of still being a child at heart and by keeping it as simple as possible didn't distract the viewers watching the film, but more so being engaged with what this backpack could do. 

The original idea for this piece was a lil' more rock-driven with a shuffling brush kit rhythm but I decided to scratch that all together and re-thought the entire process, wrote it all out in a single night, and presented it to my client who then presented it to his team and they loved it. So there you have it, all written in Logic Pro with all the guitars from Logic Pro's library with instruments from EWQL Symphonic Gold (strings at the end and the marimbas). Anyway, download it for free and enjoy!

Imagine (Finalized)

There's no back story behind this track - I just love this song. So I decided to make a cover of it. I was also getting more practice recording vocals, making them sound a little more natural, etc. So hope you enjoy!

Also, it's downloadable, if that sort of thing floats your boat.

Can't Help Falling In Love (Cover)

Composer for Hogwarts Legacy

For inquiries of licensing or projects, please contact at jscottrakozy@gmail.com


F O L L O W || L I K E || E N J O Y