Category: blog

Scoring the same trailer twice, announcing the new album (and other ways to avoid the consistent piano practice)

Hey, what’s going on people? I’m so sorry to have left this blog in the free flight mode for over a month now. Doesn’t mean I haven’t been practicing though 🤓 So yeah, I have a ton of things going on (and this is one of the reasons why I had to disappear for a while). I know this is a piano practice blog, but may I just share some of my recent projects here?

So I had a chance to take part in some scoring competitions and here’s what came out of it. (For the record — scoring competitions are perfect for persons like me who struggle to combine editor and composer skills, as, by entering a competition, you normally get access to high-quality material it would have otherwise taken ages for you to create yourself 🙈).

All of them are scores for the Native Instruments’ library trailers.

The first one is called Before and After Humans:

Those heavenly voices you hear here come from the NKS library that the trailer was promoting. I just pitched them a bit (and wrote the rest of the music).

The second one is the one I actually did twice — it literally had from the very start two versions that I equally liked, so I submitted my first one (20 minutes before the deadline, as I always do) and then, the week after the deadline was long past due, I went ahead and scored the trailer the second time. The first version goes like this:

And here’s the second one:

I overdid them both a bit in terms of length, so I still had to spend some time editing my own footage in order to make up for the extra timing, but with the gorgeous NI reel doing the main visual job, it went much quicker.

To complete my list of excuses of not publishing a new practice routine in a month, I’m going to add that I’m currently actively working on my new album that’s going to come out in 2020. Here’s a little sneak peek into what it will sound like:

Hope it was not too much for you guys to digest and somehow still relevant to the topic of this blog. I am currently organising my recent piano findings and will be back with some exciting practice posts very soon! Till then — harmonise ’till it hurts! (Not proverbially, metaphorically, okay?) 🤙🏻

Mood Studies EP, short film and piano book

Hey piano fam, what’s happening! I’m finally done with releasing / promoting / advertising business I had to embark on in order to make the interwebs a little bit more aware of my new EP. I must say I am not exactly the biggest fan of the promotion part (to put it the softest way possible), but that’s something you just have to do, so yeah—

In fact, there’s a ton of amazing things I and my friends have done over the course of the last two weeks, so I’m going to take this opportunity and shamelessly share some of them with you here — although it might not have directly something to do with the piano practice, which is the main topic of this blog.

So, first of all, the EP is out on all streaming platforms, and here’s the link to all of them in one place:

https://fanlink.to/moodstudies

If you simply want to stream it, just go to my SoundCloud, but if you want to get some extras, it might make sense to check out my Bandcamp page. For this release, I collaborated with an extremely talented nature photographer Anton Ilinski, and we produced the 30-page piano book containing the sheet music for all the pieces and also featuring Anton’s stunning images. Here’s a couple of screenshots from it:

It is available as PDF and is included in the downloads of both my EP and the solo-piano version of one of its tracks (that will cost you $5 and $3 respectively). I have immensely enjoyed putting this book together and I’m really happy with how well photographs worked together with the music.

In fact, they worked so well that I decided to go ahead and edit a short film using them and some archive footage from the 70s that you can watch here:

The track you hear in this video is available in two versions — fully orchestrated that you get on the EP and grand piano only that came out as a separate release. As I said, the sheet music book is included for free in both downloads. And just because I feel like it, I’m going to share the sheet music for this very track here for free:

Jan Vaschuk — Arrivals and Departures (PDF)

Okay, so that’s what I was up to during the last couple of silent weeks, and now I’m ready to go back to focused practice and — of course — to sharing new routine ideas here, so stay tuned and — harmonise ’till it hurts! 🤓

Album release, new modal studies coming soon and more

Hey, how is it going folks? A lot of things are happening currently, so I thought it would make sense to write a quick update about it all.

First of all, some new exciting modal studies are coming, I’ve just finished cleaning up sheet music and am going to post them soon — stay tuned 🤙🏻

Second of all, I’ve just dropped a new album that is a compilation of my work during the last year. It was an intense period of my life with me finishing my music studies in California and then flying to Germany, briefly hovering over Europe in a suspended state of which-direction-am-I-going-ness, and finally hopping on my bike to cycle around the Leipzig downtown and city channels. It resulted in a collection of instrumental pieces that don’t necessarily have to coexist on an EP or LP or any kind of release really, but, as it often happens, having zoomed out far enough, I could see the big picture in which they fit very well together.

So, here it is. If you want to give it a spin, feel free to check out the release on the Bandcamp and leave me your feedback.

 

I’m also working on a new piano EP, which is currently in the post-production stage. So, a lot of new stuff on the horizon! Hope you’re enjoying your weekend and not forgetting about practice! 🤓 À plus tard!