Okay, this is going to be one strange article. You would expect a composer who is also trying to make a buck answer this question with the obvious “it’s all the best” but that would be pretentious and simply not true. I do specialize in certain kinds of music where others I am fair to good with. So what I’m going to do is try to break this site down so that you can save yourself some time in looking through it.
Let’s start with my very best stuff. This is actually a little hard to do because of my background which was essentially split down the middle between classical and popular music, mostly rock but a lot of other influences as well. My mother was so disappointed in me when I started listening to The Beatles. I don’t know why. I never stopped loving Chopin, Mozart and the rest of the giants. As a result, growing up, I developed an aptitude for a lot of things. I would say the second split, where I started losing touch, came with the arrival of disco, rap and hip hop. By this time, radio stations were very segmented. You couldn’t hear a rock tune and a dance tune on the same station. Ultimately, I had to make a choice or I would have been spending half my day spinning the dial.
Ultimately, what happened was that the advent of electronic music and all its offshoots took over a lot of my time while the more popular hip hop, rap, and other like genres were left behind.
So while I can keep a steady 4/4 beat with drum and snare and emulate dance music to a degree, it’s more from “book” smarts than it is from pure love. To that end, you might find a lot of my dance tracks to be generic and simple. You won’t hear the really slick stuff that comes out of the composers who live and breathe that music.
My electronic is more experimental and similar to the stuff that Tangerine Dream put out. You’ll hear a distinctive 70s sound. If that’s what you need, you’ve probably come to the right place. If it’s more modern, maybe not so much. I kind of lost track of a lot of electronic music when the sub genres started going through the roof. The list of them could choke a horse.
At the same time, I’m also not any kind of an expert at stuff like dub step, jungle and other forms of dance. Again, I can give you the gist, but the hardcore stuff you’re not going to find here.
Before we get to where I shine, let’s just briefly touch on ethnic or world music. My pieces are very stereotypical simply because I didn’t grow up with this stuff. If you want truly authentic and unique ethnic music, you need to get it from somebody who is actually of that ethnicity. Simulators, no matter how talented they are as writers, will always only be that…simulators.
So let’s get to where I shine. That would be four different genres where I am equally as good in each one.
Rock
Pop
Classical
Orchestral
I should probably differentiate between pure classical and orchestral as far as how I break them up on the site.
Classical is anything that has a classical feel to it that doesn’t include your typical orchestral instruments like woodwinds, brass and strings. A typical classical piece might be a piano and violin duet.
Orchestral music is just that, music that has full or nearly full orchestral arrangements. This only includes movie like themes such as the kind of stuff that John Williams writes. However, if you’re looking for John Williams quality, I think I might fall a little short. But then he won’t write for $100 for each minute of music. So you have to look at the plus side of going with somebody like myself. I can definitely get the job done on those orchestral scores.
Moving away from classical music, there’s rock and pop. I break these up based on the sound, period. Rock will have drums, bass, guitars and maybe an organ while pop will have piano, sax, strings and maybe some brass. So where is the line between a pop piece and an orchestral piece? Good question. Sometimes that line is very blurry. And that makes sense as there are so many pieces of music that have been written that cross over genres. So it’s possible you’ll find a piece of music in a particular category that you might think belongs somewhere else. This isn’t an exact science.
As far as quality goes, my rock, pop, classical and orchestral pieces, for the most part, are solid. Sure, there’s some generic stuff mixed in with them (after all, this is a royalty free site and you need to have certain sounds for a generic project) but you’ll find, if you listen carefully, that I have a real feel for these genres, unlike something like Latin that I literally have to listen to dozens of pieces of music just to come up with something that vaguely resembles the genre. I would have to say that Latin is probably my weakest genre on the site with R&B coming in a close second.
I remember at a music workshop one day many years ago, a woman was listening to a recording of a song that one of the composers in the workshop wrote. It was a blues like tune with a female singer. I thought it was pretty good. The woman said, and I quote, “That woman does not know the blues.” These are genres that require somebody who really lives this stuff if you want it to be authentic. As a skinny white boy from New Jersey, I never lived the blues or the Four Tops for that matter. It is what it is.
When I do a custom score, I pretty much only take jobs where the person is looking for orchestral music because for me (it was my first love) it is the easiest to write. So if you need an orchestral score for your video or project, send me an email. You won’t be sorry.
Anyway, there you have it…an honest evaluation of my site. I hope if was helpful.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim