December Updates

Posted by sara-garrard

A quick blog entry to recap what I can remember that I forgotten to recap…
Various things that should be coming up soon-ish include:

  1. This year’s PIANOWRIMO album finalised for Bandcamp and streaming etc
  2. Ditto the sheet music (Related to that, I was very excited by all the new look niceness of Musescore 4 … only to realise my operating system is just too far behind to run it 😭)
  3. More FFVII Demakes redone with not strictly soundfont sounds for Spotify etc … and possibly some more new Crisis Core related ones, it being the season.
  4. I’ve done a “year in review” type video the past couple years, and it’d be nice to get one of those done before or around new year — time permitting!

Things that have been happening recently:

  1. This year’s Sing Clifton Christmas concert! Including a first performance of my Christmas piece O Night Restful and Deep
  2. I have been working on another game music & sound design job that I can’t share any of currently but will be keeping me nicely busy for a while now. I’ve also been doing more teaching, with more school age piano students at a school and a gratifying influx of adults realising their dream to play the oboe outside of that!
  3. This wonderful performance of Four Hildegard Texts by Peter Anthony Smith and the Sydney Sydney Conservatorium Clarinet Ensemble:

Gacha game music ~

Posted by sara-garrard

Excited to finally be able to share something I’d been working on over the summer and early autumn: music, and also sound design.

I believe you can actually play this game worldwide … but it is in Chinese so you might not get quite so much out of it if you don’t read Chinese!

I composed the two battle themes and the main/town background music, along with the sound design you’ll hear in the gacha roll part (see 9:41 in this gameplay video.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYAPIXytUag

And here you can hear a bit of the other battle theme which I think goes with player vs player battles and I haven’t seen in a gameplay video yet, but it’s fairly epic:

Trailer: Facebook has slightly completely destroyed the sound quality, but here is the trailer which contains a new musical theme and sound effects.

Wild Roses (piano)

Posted by sara-garrard
little piano piece!

Sorry no roses in the video… more like a farewell to summer thing. Though the mood is rather more emotional even tragic in the middle there, you can put your own story to it 🙂

There is sheet music for this on the sheet music page. I wanted something pretty easy under the hands. It is kind of Einaudi lite, but just the two pages. I used an old Roland SC88 piano for this sound.

Songs and Carols for Christmas

Posted by sara-garrard

I have just updated the sheet music page with a bunch of choral scores, in time for Christmas! ‘Twas in the Moon of the Wintertime / The Huron Carol we have sung several times in Sing Clifton; the rest are new, one getting its first performance this year.

Personal updates Aug 2022

Posted by sara-garrard

Last month I went on a choir course, singing a whole lot of Palestrina in an Italian Palazzo for a week, as you do. If you see me, ask me more, because it was an amazing time.

Here we are:

We also had a little time every day to rehearse things on our own in small groups, and the result really was like a movie or an imagining of what musicians get up — you’d wander around the castle and literally hear five or so different songs emanating from the various rooms. Same in the morning hearing people doing their warmups in beautiful voices. I met some very lovely lasses who kindly sang my pieces, and we did a couple of scratch performance of the entire of As the morning star!

All of which definitely got me thinking again about choral music, both singing it and writing it. Something I wish to do more of! Watch this space, maybe?! At any rate after… EDINBURGH, which is fast coming up.

And also, conveniently fitting into the couple weeks between Italy and Edinburgh, I was thrilled to be quite out of the blue asked to write music for a game. I’m excited partly because of the type of music I get to write, and also because this is a paying gig off the back of my free RPG music packs on itch – feels like that’s the absolute ideal outcome, and it would be fab if it happened again. So, going to be working on that: music that I probably won’t be able to share or link to the finished game for a while, but I will let you all know when it does come out!