Sorry if you were expecting more picture books today, I sort of got a little sidetracked…

At some point I’m going to have to think about adding audio to the books. Narration is quite easy, but one of the reasons the Kids English books worked so well was that each page had its own music score. They changed and twisted with the story and really made it feel more like a movie than a book. For the current set of stories I’d really like to try and continue this.

Using royalty free library music is one route. But it is quite expensive and actually finding the right tracks is very time consuming. So I figured it would be quite fun to try and score the picture books myself! It would be like doing a movie. But can I afford to take the time off to do this? Well, there’s only one way to find out.

So I popped into town to buy a new MIDI keyboard. I got the Korg K25 which was a steal at 8,500 yen. (I did really want the Korg MicroX but it’s just too big to carry around!). Anyway the K25 comes with a free version of Korg’s M1 synth, and wow, is this good! When I was a kid I would have loved to have an M1, and now they are giving them away for free.

So the next step is to broaden my production skills. What I really need is a crash course on Orchestration. And thanks to Sound on Sound magazine, I’ve found one. And it’s online in Multimedia. And it’s free. And it’s written by Rimsky-Korsakov. You can’t get a much better teacher than that! So if you fancy brushing up your music skills, have a look at; Online PRINCIPLES OF ORCHESTRATION by Rimsky-Korsakov.