Engineer By Design » Projects

A Piano Peek

Charlene — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:44:12 +0000

This is a little bit overdue, but here’s a little piano peek at something I plan on basing a next song over.

Song Title: Charlene (piano peek)
Arranged By: Charlene Valerio
Instruments: Live! Grand Piano
Listen:
Download audio file (Charlene-piano-peek.mp3)

Right click to download: Charlene Valerio – Charlene (Piano Peek)

Our spectacular festival pageant of night time magic and imagination

Charlene — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:33:53 +0000

On a whim, I decided to practice music arrangement last night. It had been a while since I had practiced it, where my last “serious test” with it was in covering Traverse Town. I decided to make a short of the main theme from the Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade because it’s a perfect example of having different instruments (or tracks) carrying a wide variety of melodies where they all come together in harmony as one very fun and charming song.

At this point I’m not too sure if I want to call this project complete or not. There’s still much room for improvement in “cleaning” the tracks and that since the full song actually breaks into a series of units (Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Peter Pan, etc) I could continue it on to experiment with different vocal styles on my keyboard. Also, I’m playing this at a slower tempo than the original version, yet the tempo that I’m playing at is already 190 beats per minute!

But for now, this should suffice.

Song Title: Main Street Electrical Parade (short cover)
Arranged By: Charlene Valerio
Original Artist: Bob Jani and Ron Miziker
Instruments: 80’s Brass (carries 2 melodies), Poly Synth Pad, Tinker Bell, Standard Drum Kit 1
Style: Learning 4/4
Listen:
Download audio file (Main-Street-Electrical-Parade-short.mp3)

Right-click to download: Charlene Valerio – Main Street Electrical Parade (short cover)

Meet The PANDA's series: who's next?

Charlene — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:09:39 +0000

Within the next few days/week I will be making the next piece of work in the Meet The PANDA’s series. At the moment I’m thinking about creating one as PANDA | Jarhead as the Heavy for the reason that the Heavy update is the most recent update to come out.

I’m also leaning towards Akabane as a Sniper based on how much he’s played that class, and for the other PANDA’s I’m going to have to wait for them to get back to me. At the same time, it’d be a great thing for me too since each piece of work will be a learning experience by setting the bar higher after each piece of work.

It should be a pretty exciting set once they’re all out.

New Project

Charlene — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:12:46 +0000

For a while now I’ve been thinking of a project to foster my creativity. I never really felt like I had the opportunity to do so before, especially with school being in the way. It’s not going to help that I’d be starting graduate school this fall or spring, but if I keep delaying, then it’ll never get done.

I’ve resolved myself into making a 3D animated short to tie music and art together. I’m deciding on 3D modeling because it inevitably has to incorporate 2D art, and that only recently did I find out that I’m pretty good with 3D modelling. (A side project with CATIA training at work turned out to be of an artistic marvel.)

A couple months ago for Sean’s projects in game development, I sketched him a cat, though I wouldn’t mind making and using it in the animation. As a for fun thing last night, I challenged myself to a “Time Attack” challenge where I produced one sketch a minute for five minutes of the cat:

Without a storyline, it’s hard to determine if this little guy would end up in the final product, but he’s at least a start to character design to get the ball rolling.

I plan to use the open-source software, Blender, for my 3D models. I haven’t decided yet if I want to use it on my laptop or desktop, or Linux or Windows. It shouldn’t matter too much, though. As a method of learning I’m going to try and model WALL-E in Blender, since I’ve found that working on something by scratch, versus going by step-by-step tutorials, is the best way for me to learn. I bought a manual on Blender recently and have flipped through it a little, but I know that it’s soon time to work on it!

I imagine that with a project this big it would probably take me about 1-2 years to develop, but that’s alright. All great works have to start somewhere, and I’m already looking forward to the finished product.