Sunlight

I've finished a new cello song! :D This one started out as a travelling theme for a game concept with a little boat, but will end up on my album as the intermezzo where the story jumps from the 1850s to the 1950s. The title reminds of both uses. I hope you like it! Musically the idea behind this song was to play with delay/echo: two of the instruments get a rhythmic echo. This is a fun little musical effect with a big impact, as it results in these instruments constantly playing chords with their own previous notes. It's easy to mess this up by choosing the wrong progression of chords and making it sound dissonant and ugly (or to do this on purpose, if dissonance is the goal). During most of the song I steer away from this and choose notes that sound nice with the notes that came before. However, at the end of the cello melody (at 1:10 in the video) I go from C# to C. This is very dissonant but at the same time brings us back to the chords at the start of the song. I really lik...

I've finished a new song for my cello album! This one revolves around a gently bobbing... typewriter! Most of the song has my cello as the main melodic instrument, plus some humming vocals here and there. My goal with this composition was to give it a really relaxed feel, which I think worked out quite well. :) As with all my songs, sheet music for cello can be found at music.joostvandongen.com . I've also included a recording of the song without the cello, to play along to. Vocals and artwork were done by Marissa Delbressine. Guitar was played by Thomas van Dijk. One thing I had a lot of fun with for this composition, was cutting up a sample of a typewriter into separate keystrokes, so that I could then play typewriter on my keyboard. This allowed me to create a typewriter that's typing freeform, but at the same time does keep to the rhythm a little bit.

I've finished recording a new composition! It's a cello trio inspired by minimal music (Philip Glass and such). Sheet music can be found at music.joostvandongen.com . This contains the version for cello trio and also an arrangement for violin, viola and cello. This composition started out as something I was improvising while warming up for a Cello Fortress performance in Dublin last year. I had a lot of fun playing repetitive parts with varying rhythms and afterwards I heard from some people who were sitting nearby that it sounded really tense. Good music provokes some kind of emotion so I figured I should turn that little improvisation into a real song. Recording this one was a challenge since it needs to be so rhythmic and precise to work. It took me a lot of practice and editing but in the end I'm happy with the result. :) I also had fun making an image for this one: I combined a photo of my own cello with a photo of machinery I found online. Unfortunately I couldn'...

Here's my newest composition: Sandrider! It's a cello trio that revolves around fast arpeggios. At a whopping 5 minutes this one was a LOT of work to record and edit to get it to sound just right. But it was worth it: I'm really happy with the result. :) Sheet music can be found at music.joostvandongen.com , including arrangements for violin, viola and cello, plus solo versions for if you don't happen to have a cello trio around. This track was inspired by the way Ernst Reijseger plays in his beautiful song Strabismo Di Venere (from the album Colla Voche). He plays really fast arpeggios there by sweeping over the four strings. I experimented with this way of playing quite a bit and discovered that it also works really well when you play a bit louder than what Reijseger does in Strabismo Di Venere. I played around with this technique in the live improvisations that djembe player Rene Derks and I did to the game Journey. I liked the sound of that so much that I decided t...

Here's my newest song: "Grom"! It's a loud cello trio! I deliberately make the strings rattle a bit to get a more aggressive sound, which was a fun thing to fool around with. This is actually an older composition: I wrote this one in 2012 to play together with the other cellists of the Kunstorkest, which I was a member of at the time. Since at the Kunstorkest we were supposed to play subtly and rarely truly loudly, I wanted to write something that's super loud and unsubtle, just for the fun of doing something different. At the time I never actually recorded it though, so I did that now and here it is! :) Sheet music for this one can be found at music.joostvandongen.com . I've also made arrangements for violin and viola, which can also be found there. PS. Until I took that photo I never realised how evil a cello's bridge can look...

I've finished a new song! It's a longer instrumental track with an extensive cello solo towards the end. :) For this track I had a lot of fun playing around with delay (echo). The rhodes (the piano-like instrument that's heard throughout) has a rhythmic echo at every 8th note. This means that the rhodes is basically constantly playing harmonies with the notes it played just before, which is a pretty interesting effect. At 2:58 I even switch to playing triplets on the rhodes while the delay keeps going in normal 8th notes. So the echo and the original notes have a different rhythm there, which gives an even more interesting effect. In case anyone wants to give playing it a try, here's the sheet music for the cello part, plus a recording of the song without the cello, to play along to: Cello sheet music Recording without cello to play along to This is the longest track I've finished so far and I'm really happy with the result. I hope you enjoy it! ^_^

I've recorded a new piece! It's a short sad cello solo called 'Lament'. The composition itself isn't really new: I wrote it way back in 2001. However, I never managed to record it to my own satisfaction and thus never published it online. After all these years I've now finally managed to make a recording that I'm happy with. It's not perfect of course, but I finally dare publish it and share the sheet music. In case anyone wants to give it a try, here's the sheet music: Sheet music for cello solo I found another recording I made of this one from 2010. I wasn't happy with it back then and indeed, listening to it now makes me realise that I did get quite a bit better at recording my cello since then. Part of that is in technique, like having a better microphone, using a clicktrack and stitching together recordings to combine the best parts from several recordings. But I can also hear that I have more control of my cello now: especially my vibrato g...

I've composed and recorded a new song! :) It's called The Master Waits and it's a duet for either two cellos, or viola and cello. Here's a recording: I'd be honoured if anyone else were to play this (not that I expect many cellists read this blog ;) ), so here's the sheet music: Cello + cello Viola + cello This composition came about when I was improvising a bit and discovered that you get a pretty cool sound if you pluck the open C string at every beat and then add various chords on top of that. I had so much fun with that that I decided to write a composition around this idea. :) Initially I thought this one was pretty easy to play, but it turned out to be really hard to get the pitch exactly right for all of those chords. Keep in mind that unlike a guitar, a cello doesn't have frets, so if you're finger is only 1mm off, it already sounds bad. There's quite a lot of dissonance here (on 0:19 the plucking part even plays G and g# together) which is a...

I've made a new song! It's an instrumental track that features a lot of cello, in combination with vocals and digital instruments. There's more cello here than you might realise: the eerie scratching sound at the beginning and ending is also cello! :) Normally as a cellist you wouldn't want to make a sound like that, but here it adds to the atmosphere nicely. This sound is achieved by slowly playing on the open G or C string, too close to the bridge while applying too little pressure. The cello solo at 1:57 has distortion applied to it, making it sound a bit closer to an electric guitar than a cello normally would. I've made sheet music for the cello part, and a recording of the song without the cello so that it can be played along to. The result is quite different from any other cello music I know and I find it quite fun to play along to. Here it is, in case anyone wants to give it a try: Cello sheet music Recording without cello, for play-along The vocals towards ...

Over the years I've composed quite a few songs that include my cello, but I never dared actually record and release them. I did publish some recordings before, but I've always marked them as "unfinished" or "quick sketch" or some other excuse, planning to practice more and make a better recording later on. Today I finally have one that I consider "finished", but the process ended up quite different from what I expected back then. It's called Growl, and it's a loud cello duet. Have a listen! I'd love for others to also play this composition, so I've made sheet music for it as well. Let me know if you end up playing this composition: I'd be honoured and would like to hear how it went! Score Cello 1 Cello 2 I've also made a start with making a page that collects all my music and sheet music. It currently doesn't contain much yet, but I intend to record and release all my compositions. That means I have a lot of work ahead o...

I've previously written about how Rene Derks and I did a live musical improvisation to someone playing Journey and Ori And The Blind Forest. This was a pretty unique experiment already, but recently we kicked it up a notch with an even bolder performance: instead of knowing what was coming, we let players choose whatever game they wanted to play and we had to improvise live music to that. Since this was an experiment not all of it worked well, but I think it was a success: a bunch of games turned out pretty awesome and we learned a lot. Today I'd like to explain how we approached each game and why some of them worked, and others turned out not to be a great fit for this format. I've included a couple of short videos from the performance, check 'm out! The basic idea for these performances is that we mix live improvisation with gameplay. Instead of playing the original game's soundtrack we come up with new music on the spot and try to respond to whatever is happenin...

Recently I've done a couple of music performances that were quite different from any live game music performance I've ever seen. We let someone play the games Journey and Ori And The Blind Forest live on stage and we improvised a completely new soundtrack on the spot, reacting to whatever the player was doing. This was a unique experiment for us and we learned a lot about what works and what doesn't, so today I'd like to share our approach and experiences. Usually when game music is performed live the original soundtrack is replicated by musicians on stage. We however completely ignored whatever the original soundtrack had sounded like and improvised based on what we saw. The resulting music is different with each performance and sounds nothing like the original soundtrack. The fun of improvisation is that it's entirely in the moment . You don't know what's going to happen and it will never happen in the exact same way again. A truly live experience! Sometim...

I've added a new cello attack to Cello Fortress! Check this little video for a demo and explanation. :)

In my previous blogpost (which is already quite a while ago, sorry for that: I have been really busy on the graphics for Cello Fortress), I explained how my algorithm works for detecting what the cello plays in Cello Fortress . The big missing part there, was that the algorithm I use not only finds the notes that are being played, but also tons of notes that are not being played. Most of those erroneous notes can easily be detected and removed, so let's have a look at how to find and eliminate them. Octaves The first problem is octaves. Because of the way my algorithm works, for every note that is found, its octaves are usually also found. Octaves are notes at exactly double the frequency, and double of that, etc. For example, A2 is 110hz, so the octaves that are also found are A3 (220hz), A4 (440hz), A5 (880hz), etc. Finding octaves is inherent to how my algorithm works: I detect notes for which both the own frequency and the overtones (multiples) are strong. The octaves are all...

My new game Cello Fortress is controlled by a cello. This is a really weird and unique thing, and comes with some serious challenges. So far I have discussed the game design aspect of this, but at the very core of the game lies a much more technical topic: detecting notes in real-time from a live cello. Cello Fortress really knows what notes I am playing. I developed my own algorithm for that, and although it is not perfect (it quite often shortly detects notes that are not actually played), it works surprisingly well for such a difficult technical problem. So how does it work? Let's have a look! The big challenge here is that a cello produces a very complex sound pattern. There are all kinds of overtones, scratches and noises in it, and detecting the actual note from that is incredibly difficult. I did some research before I began programming the game, and it turns out that finding notes in a live acoustic instrument is in fact an unsolved problem. There is quite a lot of researc...

The most unique aspect of Cello Fortress is how a cellist does a live performance in front of an audience, while at the same time controlling a game. This is completely different from other music games, in which the musician usually plays on a fake plastic instrument, and even if he plays a real instrument, he does nothing but imitate an existing song. In most such other music games, there is hardly any real gameplay: just points based on how well you played the song. Cello Fortress is a completely different affair: here the cellist is controlling a real game, with real choice and interaction. Depending on what his opponents do, the cellist plays different notes. The cellist can even do things like baiting the opponents with a certain attack and then switching to another. So how does that work? What does the cellist need to do to trigger the various attacks? Check this trailer to see (and hear!) how it works: Live video footage in the trailer shot by Zoomin.tv Games at the Indie Game...

A couple of months ago I revealed my new project Cello Fortress . Now it is finally time for a proper trailer! Cello Fortress is a unique combination of a live cello concert and a game, and is intended to be played at events (festivals and such). This trailer shows how the game works, and shows a bit of the interaction between the players and the cellist. Cello Fortress is pretty weird and unique, so I guess so far only those who actually played it, really understood what Cello Fortress is about. Hopefully this trailer will clear it up for others as well! (Video footage recorded by Dyzlo Film at Indigo .) In essence, Cello Fortress is a twin stick shooter. Four players cooperate using Xbox controllers to destroy as many cannons as possible. However, the cannons are not controlled by the computer, but by a live cellist! He improvises live music on his cello, and tries to do that in such a way that the game not only does what he wants, but also that the music actually sounds good. In a ...

Today I am announcing my new project: Cello Fortress ! Cello Fortress is a really weird game concept, very experimental. I am really happy to finally have started working on it, after having it floating around in my head for years. ^_^ Cello Fortress can only be played live at events, and it will debut at the Indigo exhibition later this month! Cello Fortress combines a live cello concert with a twin-stick-shooter, in which the cellist plays against the audience. It brings a unique experience in which I control the game by improvising on my cello, simultaneously fending off attacks and making music. The audience takes up controllers and tries to beat the fortress. The result is an exciting interplay between cellist, players and audience. Up to four players use controllers to navigate their tank, using one stick to move and the other to shoot. They dodge bullets and attack the turrets. At the same time, the game analyses the notes played by the cellist, as picked up by a microphone. Ag...