SonataMaxx
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top 50
5
songs
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Bela Lugosi (I Feel Boxed In Just Like) Bela Lugosi (I Feel Boxed In Just Like)
Sometimes you might feel like Bela Lugosi, too.
Fall in Wisconsin Fall in Wisconsin
Angels We Have Heard (On High) Angels We Have Heard (On High)
One World One World
Show Me Show Me
Sonata Maxx is a mix of live and digital music, exploring a wide range of styles instrumentally. "Sonata Maxx is a project I've been kicking around since 1996," says composer Ken E. Kmak (pronounced Kuh-mack). "I wanted to find a way to yoke the longer musical sentences and paragraphs of classical music, to the rhythmically exciting engines of rock and pop music." Because of the enormous costs of rehearsing and recording a live orchestra, Kmak had an enormous backlog of materials waiting for aural realization. "I had all these orchestral rock ideas but no way to hear them outside of my own head," said Kmak. That backlog started to disappear in 2004 when Kmak was able to merge a fast enough computer with fairly realistic sounding soundfonts and recent midi software. He describes the style of Sonata Maxx as "rock classique." "I love rock and pop. But great pop songs, except Layla and Stairway to Heaven and maybe inna gadda da vida, are just too short." He grinned. "I guess I have a longer attention span than during my MTV years. "But ever since I was a kid, I was fascinated with how the 'great' composers, like Beethoven, could take a small musical motif and turn it into a five minute composition...and longer!" "In Sonata Maxx I try to use a lot of classical techniques in the composition. For example, in straight rock you're going to ruin a song if you change the riff. If it's changed enough it stops being a riff and becomes a musical motif, something normally alien to rock." "So in Sonata Maxx I want to explore longer development of musical ideas in both classical and rock styles, sometimes with some jazz tossed in, with interesting dynamics, key changes and modulations, the whole nine symphonies." He laughed. "For me the trick is to make the orchestra sound like a classical orchestra and not a cheezy film score, and to make the rock rhythm section play like real rock, and then somehow blend those two styles into a single composition." The first album from Sonata Maxx, One World, will be out in June, 2006. The title track, and the first one released, won garageband.com's Best Keyboards, Best Programming/Sequencing and Best Potential Movie Soundtrack for the week ending April 10, 2006, and was featured Instrumental Rock Track of the Day on April 18, 2006. More to come!What equipment do you use?
"Currently I use a lot of MIDI and SoundFonts, sometimes by themselves and sometimes overlaid with live tracks."
"I started with a program called Studio, which was a great program. I still like the way it breaks two-handed piano parts into correct grand staff notation. "Nowadays I'm using Music Creator and Sonar Home Studio 4, but I've been looking into Sibelius, Finale 2006 and Garritan's Personal Orchestra."Contact
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