meltingearth

intelligent and artful media

IK Version 3 is Official Live!

By Leave a Comment

Intuitive Keys Legacy is designed to provide the absolute best-sounding, most comprehensive library of sounds from stock MainStage.

Expanded

IK is now drastically expanded over the first version released in 2017. Today, IK is built on 80 instrument instances, which significantly expands its sonic palette. IK is efficiently built around layers and aliases. Included preconfigured are:

  • 60 pads  (warm, bright, chaotic)
  • 20 synths (14 polys / 6 monos)
  • 20 keyboards (Rhodes, EPs, Organs)
  • 15 Orchestral (plucks, strings)
  • 40 Movement (arps, pulses, animations)

Stock Pianos + Audio In

Intuitive Keys supports two stock pianos at the concert level (always available at the touch of a button), and also supports hardware input! So if your hardware keyboard isn’t getting much love these days, try running it through our piano engine, and breathe new life into even older machines. If you’re running a Nord as a controller, here’s your chance to put that machine to some good use!

The brightness/darkness of the stock Yamaha and Steinway pianos is tuned with the mod wheel. In the default mod wheel position, the pianos are tuned to be warm and sit under the vocals. Three compression settings are available on the pianos: Soft (default), Lush, and Hard, and two reverbs are available, Spacious and Dense, plus a spectacular Shimmer effect. An Add 8va button is available which puts an octave on top of the note you’re playing. This is extremely useful for featuring thematic elements on breaks between song sections. Taken together, the piano engine has a powerful emotional range that allows you to tell the story of the song in a compelling way!

Intuitive Keys optionally supports Piano 162, Grand Rhapsody, Alecia’s Keys, The Giant, with piano instrument channels, all of which can be configured through the piano engine. In this way, IK maintains the efficiency of using just one instance of a piano sound, with the full flexibility of configuring it as needed.

Wake Up (feat. Amanda Joy Hu) [Underwater Mix]

By Leave a Comment

underwaterMy friend Amanda Joy Hu asked if we could record a simple piano version of “All Sons & Daughters” song “Wake Up” for some missionary friends of hers going through a rough time. How could I say no? Plus it was a chance to record with Amanda – who is extremely talented and has just a gorgeous voice. So we got together on Saturday morning along with bassist and habitual partner in crime Teo, and spend a couple hours improvising in headphones together, to a click. My secret suspicion was we would have something special here, so I wanted to be sure we were playing to a click so I could have a little fun with it after everyone left.

So sure enough, I really loved the vocal (which Amanda helped edit over email if you can believe it!). Although I wasn’t really familiar with the song before we tracked it, it really seemed to me like there was a drowning component to the song, one of suffocation under the weight of circumstances, so I used that as the seed of inspiration for my keyboard programming and just kept “underwater mix” in my mind throughout.

Here it is on soundcloud – but please add it to your favorite music platform as well – and let me know what you think!!

@ iTunes | Music | Spotify | Amazon | Google Play

 

Vocal by Amanda Joy Hu
Bass by Aron Teo Lee
Programming by Peter Bulanow

Recorded, Mixed and Mastered at the Matrix, Herndon VA
Produced by Peter Bulanow for meltingearth.com

Written by David Leonard, Don Chaffer, Leslie Jordan
(All Sons & Daughters, Season One)

The Revised Common Lectionary

By Leave a Comment

Cx_SeventhSundayofEasterThe lectionary reading for May 8th 2016 is a very meltingearth kind of scripture.

This wasn’t the Psalm that originally inspired the name, so I’m starting to realize David explored these ideas on more than on occasion.

Psalm 97
The LORD is king! Let the earth rejoice; let the many coastlands be glad!
Clouds and thick darkness are all around him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.
Fire goes before him, and consumes his adversaries on every side.
His lightnings light up the world; the earth sees and trembles.
The mountains melt like wax before the LORD, before the Lord of all the earth.
The heavens proclaim his righteousness; and all the peoples behold his glory.
All worshipers of images are put to shame, those who make their boast in worthless idols; all gods bow down before him.
Zion hears and is glad, and the towns of Judah rejoice, because of your judgments, O God.
For you, O LORD, are most high over all the earth; you are exalted far above all gods.
The LORD loves those who hate evil; he guards the lives of his faithful; he rescues them from the hand of the wicked.
Light dawns for the righteous, and joy for the upright in heart.
Rejoice in the LORD, O you righteous, and give thanks to his holy name!

The MeltingEarth Band

By Leave a Comment

Building Your Band SQBuilding Your Band is one of the really practical applications of meltingearth. It’s a concerted effort to pass on to the next generation of musicians the wisdom and experience of an established musician.

Building Your Band is also a response to a general observation – that more often than not when I hear music that isn’t working, the solution is not necessarily that the musicians individually need to become more proficient. Rather, the solution is often that a producer needs to get everyone and the band working together better in order to better serve the song.

Building Your Band is a blog where I write about these issues, but it’s also a podcast where I have unscripted / uncoached interviews with folks around the US and the world talking about these very issues.

Eileen, Dan, Teo, Brew, Roxy, Pete (at DCA)

L->R: Eileen, Dan, Teo, Brew, Roxy, Pete (at DCA)

Recently I had an opportunity to take a team to Jamaica to lead worship for Willow Creek’s Global Leadership Summit, as well as to host some workshops with some area churches. I took a team of veteran musicians from the DC area, most of which were podcast alumni (and the rest soon will be). It was a fantastic time of creating music with a group of music producers and worship leaders, and my favorite part of the workshops we held, is they were untouched (just like my podcast). Yet there is an incredible harmony from the perspective of each member of the team.

L->R: Brew, Dan, Roxy, Dave, Eileen, Teo, Pete: in Jamaica

L->R: Brew, Dan, Roxy, Dave, Eileen, Teo, Pete: in Jamaica

Since we can’t call ourselves “The Building Your Band Band,” we’re “meltingearth.”

 

Indescribable

By 1 Comment

A concept video set to Chris Tomlin’s song.

I love reading theoretical physics, particularly by non-theists, as their viewpoint would be without a theistic agenda (i.e. not propaganda). One of the most worshipful titles for a book that I could imagine would be “The Elegant Universe,” which is a book that the non-theist Brian Green wrote. Brian is kind of a “rock star” of modern physics, perhaps the heir apparent to Einstein and then Hawkins. This book spawned a NOVA special that walks you through the ideas of the book, and which served as much of the source material for this edit.

This product was originally created as a “click track video”, with some of the sound effects on the right channel to be sent to the house, and a click so that a live band could play in time to this song on the left channel, to be sent to the drummer’s in-ear monitors.

One of the real highlights for me was invoking the differential equations of the four electro-magnetic forces commonly known as Maxwell’s equations (1:38) to illuminate what God most certainly declared when he created light. As an engineer who studied those four equations for two semesters, having those beautiful statements presented in a sanctuary serve to unite God in his creation in a significant way.

I loved the opportunity to use the actual Apollo 8 Genesis reading during the bridge (2:25).

Calabi-YauAnother notable feature (3:12) is the rendering of the 6-dimensional Calabi Yau shape necessary for the math in String Theory, which I used to illustrate the idea of “Indescribable’. Since we live in three dimensions of space, a six dimensional object would certainly seem incomprehensible to us.

Our God, creator of our reality, with so many more dimensions than six, would be so much more so indescribable.

origins

By Leave a Comment

meltingearthlogothe name meltingearth is inspired by this passage –

at the voice of God the earth itself melts.  [Psalm 46:6 CEV]

Sacred Texts . com has this to say about the passage:

He uttered his voice – God spoke; he gave command; he expressed his will.

The earth melted – The very earth seemed to melt or dissolve before him. Everything became still. The danger passed away at his command, and the raging world became calm.

The goal of meltingearth is to facilitate this impact, this effect, through better art.