NEW ALBUM ALERT! “Dramatic Themes for Imaginary Scenes”

Douglas Wayne Ricketts
2 min readMar 19, 2023

--

I’m kicking off early 2023 with another album of mostly orchestral dramatic music. “Dramatic Themes for Imaginary Scenes” was first available for streaming or purchase exclusively on Bandcamp between March 16 and April 6. Now available on Spotify, YouTube Music, Tidal, Amazon Music, Pandora, and many more streaming services worldwide.

Album cover — A concert hall, two speakers, a computer, and a MIDI keyboard

Most of the instruments on this album are part of the EastWest Symphonic Orchestra Silver sampleset. While I do own the Gold edition which features a whole lot more articulations and other options the tracks on this album were first sketched out between 2008–2012 when I was on a much lower budget. However, as usual I strived to perform each instrument or collection of instruments in a manner which matched that of the sound created by a normal human playing the actual instrument. Does that sentence make sense? I hope so!

Other instruments such as some of the guitars and percussion were part of the Independence Free CM Edition distributed in 2008 by Computer Music magazine. I am a hoarder when it comes to digital instruments and samplesets as well, so the tabla and other middle eastern percussion which pop up from time to time come from collections I’ve gathered since beginning my composing adventure as far back as the early 1990s. While there are many sampler players built into modern Digital Audio Workstations such as KONTAKT and the like, I have been using the free Short Circuit VST to map sampled instruments to my MIDI keyboard.

Please enjoy my new album! And if you have any questions about the process or are looking for ways to get into digital musical composition on a low budget just drop a comment below.

--

--

Douglas Wayne Ricketts
Douglas Wayne Ricketts

Written by Douglas Wayne Ricketts

I do things! Sometimes music or comedy is involved. Your mileage may vary. Contact me at douglasricketts@gmail.com

No responses yet