My regular musical collaborator and I wrote a musical fantasy some years ago.

Thought that some progressive music fans here might appreciate the zero budget promo video we did for it recently.

Enjoy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTIPsmvDdWM

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Fender Highway & Classic 60s Strats, Fender Toronado, Telecaster, Gretsch Projet, Charvel 3, PRS SE Soapbar II & Custom 24, Burns Batwing and many others!

Very / Very Good!
----Danny,

Whoa - neat! Who's been a busy fella then?

So how/when/where do we get to hear the rest of it?

Tell us more...

Cheers - C

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Very cool. What'd you guys use to create the video?

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I had the idea of writing a musical several years ago. I was with my collaborator (Kevin) in the pub after a long rehearsal session, and we were looking for a big music project to tax ourselves with.

Breaking the Circle was the eventual result of that semi-drunken conversation, but it took a long, long time.

We each had certain story elements that we wanted to include, and Kevin's wife skillfully crafted a performance script from these disparate ideas with a story arc of her own creation. We're fortunate enough to have our own project studio at Kevin's home (an outbuilding also big enough for us to rehearse our usual blend of sequenced and live music) and we crafted the theatre show from there. We used 2 PCs I recall (we had to keep upgrading them as the demands on them grew) running Cubase audio, Steinberg Wavelab and T Rex mastering for the musical soundtrack. We used Adobe Premier to create video for projection at the shows. I'll have to check and get back to you on all the video packages we used - that side of it was Kevin's baby. He has a background in film making and photography from his college days.

For the incidental music and songs we used Korg N & M series synthesisers, a Korg Prophecy synth, a Korg MS2000 for vocoding and my old Moog. To this we added some PC software synths bits and pieces: including a Sequential Circuits Prophet V simulator and a G Media Mellotron simulator. Drums and percussion were a mixture of Roland, Korg and Alesis DM5 samples and a Roland TR808 software simulator. The electric guitars used were an early Ibanez Satriani model (JS100 I think), a Charvel model 475 Deluxe, and a mixture of Vox and Line 6 amps. Roughly speaking, Kevin played the electric guitars (he eats me alive on electric guitar) the Yamaha wind synth sax and flute parts and he did the drum programming. I did the keyboard playing, programming and musical arrangements, although we did cross over on occasion and swapped hats. I also played a Manuel Rodriguez nylon string classical concert guitar on a few tracks. Using this set as our orchestra, we wrote and recorded 11 new songs, a long Overture and many short incidental music pieces.

The musical is not an all singing and dancing type affair. We called it a musical fantasy and it's quite dark in places. Several fantasy video sequences were included - and these were a mixture of live filming and abstract composition. I'll tell you more about how it was staged and performed another time (including how we managed to sink the Titanic on a small theatre stage!)

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Fender Highway & Classic 60s Strats, Fender Toronado, Telecaster, Gretsch Projet, Charvel 3, PRS SE Soapbar II & Custom 24, Burns Batwing and many others!

Cool video adey!

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Outstanding Adey, very well put together, sounds like a trailer for a movie, very cool

Very cool Adey, well put together, I would like to hear more.

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The film trailer idea was exactly the effect we wanted to create, so thanks for that.

Cheers guys, glad you enjoyed. Wil post a bit more on this later..

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Fender Highway & Classic 60s Strats, Fender Toronado, Telecaster, Gretsch Projet, Charvel 3, PRS SE Soapbar II & Custom 24, Burns Batwing and many others!

Thanks for your interest.

As I recall we re-used Adobe Premier to sequence the stills, moving images and lettering, into the video you've seen. Premier also handled the audio track which we'd prepared on Cubase originally then Sonar, before mastering with T Rex. The original video sections for the theatrical presentation were prepared on Adobe Premier and it's sister product, Adobe After Effects.

Other video packages were also used for the original show sequences, but I don't recall all the details. One was a programme that created an abstract moving sequence from a still image, another was a French programe called Vue D'Esprit, that we used to create detailed landscapes for our projected performance backdrops. The other was a programme to create CCG moving water images and CCG moving flame images. Some of these programmes took days to render video sequences -frame by frame by frame.. Needed a lot of patience and a more professional PC than the one we had available!

All this video stuff was new to me, but fortunately my collaborator researched what was required and operated it all with considerable skill. Clever bloke..

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Fender Highway & Classic 60s Strats, Fender Toronado, Telecaster, Gretsch Projet, Charvel 3, PRS SE Soapbar II & Custom 24, Burns Batwing and many others!