Wake Not The Dead

Introducing Wake Not The Dead and the Rock Opera Orchestra.

What is Wake Not The Dead

Let start at.....well...at the start.

Ok. I know that was not very original. Rule number one in writing songs is to never use cliches, and that was a shocking cliche.

The one thing we can however promise you, is that Wake Not The Dead is not a cliche. It promise to be something very different from what you have ever seen or heard.

Wake Not The Dead is a new and exciting rock opera with book by Anne Lombard and music and lyrics by Eric Swardt. Based on Johann Tiek's story, this tale of horror, bravery and love that never die, will take you on a journey through a fantasy world of dark cemeteries, castles, and medieval towns to be remembered for many years.

The rock opera tells the story of Dominic (Michael Shane Brownhill), a baron who wakes Brunhilda (Anne Lombard), his childhood lover, from the grave with the assistance of Batista (Tedd Croukamp), a wandering sorcerer, while back home, Swanhilda (also played by Anne Lombard), his wife and mother of his children is trying to keep things sane.

In the next few weeks we will keep you up to date with all the news you want to know about Wake Not The Dead.

The Rock Opera Orchestra

More importantly, we will tell you all about the people who are bringing Wake Not The Dead to life.

(Was that pun a bit better?)

You are most likely receiving this newsletter because you know somebody who are in the Rock Opera Orchestra, or maybe you are in the orchestra yourself. Whichever, in the newsletters over the next weeks we will tell you all about these wonderful people.

In short, the Rock Opera Orchestra is exactly what the name implies. It is the orchestra who will perform our rock opera. The members are:

Michael Shane Brownhill - singer

Tedd Croucamp - singer

Anne Lombard - singer

Gideon Meintjies - drummer

Andre Liebenberg - bass guitar

Nathan Lowe - keyboards

Werner Benade - guitars

Gideon Jones - guitars

When and where?

Ah. This is the important question.

Everybody wants to know when and where they can come and see the Rock Opera Orchestra performing.

Make sure you subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Facebook and twitter to make sure you do not miss us.

What we can tell you at this stage is that the Rock Opera Orchestra are rehearsing in all earnest and are almost ready to go out and play. We are also in process of recording a concept album. We are talking weeks - not months.

Make sure you are the first to know when and where we will perform and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

https://www.facebook.com/ROOCHESTRA

@Wakentd

Even more important, please forward this email to your friends, mothers, family and foes. In fact, please forward it to anybody you think might be interested. Ask them - no insist - to join us.

Keep in touch and we promise you a time of fun and love.

Eric

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Do not miss the news!

What did I ever do wrong (feat. Gabrielle)

 

New song recording!

 

You can download the track here What did I ever do wrong.

Or stream it from my web site at Dog-on-blues, or from Soundcloud.

Every song has a story. This song has a bit of a winded story behind it. It started off when I wrote the songs for my musical in progress, Wake not the dead. This is a horror / love story musical with some twists. The story goes that Walter, a rich baron from some weird place just south of Transilvania revived his childhood lover from the grave. He then sat with the little problem of his newly-revived-from-the-grave-ex-lover-and-now-new-girl-friend was in no mood to share him and his house with his wife. So, Walter had to tell his wife to get out.

Swanhilda, Walter's wife, answered him with this lament.

The story of the song does not end there. Originally it was written as a rather showtunes song. And waited on the rack for further attention. I started writing songs for Annemie since the start of this year and record her songs in my studio. Up,to now, I wrote about ten songs for her. One of the songs she wanted was a sad blues, with a piano triplets track, similar to what can be heard in the Guns and roses song, Since you've been gone.

After about the third attempt of writing lyrics, I dug the lyrics of this song out from the grave and showed it to her. Happy with what she read, but not happy with the music, we decided to change the song to a blues song. She then came up with a beautifull tune from Zaz as a reference.

With these four things in mind I reworked the song. The Zaz song for the beginning, Guns and roses in the background, the blues tune and the lyrics from Wake not the dead all came together in this song.

Not long, and well, Annemie decided to drop this song from her repertoir, leaving me with what I considdered to be a very beautiful tune. Not wantng to let it die on the rack, I sent the song in to Studio Pros to see what I can do and asked Gabrielle to do the vocals.

The results are now ready for your enjoyment!

I want to add lead guitars, but decided that I will have to leave some space for future surprise! What do you think? Does it need a lead guitar?

Those who followed my blog from the start will recognize Gabrielle's lovely voice in the role of Cathy in the musical, The exile, where she is featured on the songs, I have never and Prisoner of your spell.

 

The big plan

Planning is an essential skill for anybody who wants to get something done. This can be anything from writing a song, or recording a whole album, or even putting up a live show. Every musician can benefit his or her carreer greatly by following this kind of process. It is simple and takes little extra time, but saves a lot of time later on.

If you have been following the previous posts on this blog, you will remember how I embarked on this exercise of planning. First I identified the problem. Then I deided on a mission, and then I broke the problem down into detail tasks. Today, I will show you how I visualized my plan on a simple spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets are handy for this kind of task, as most people have Excel already on their computers, or can download many alternatives for free.

To visualize the plan, I start by listing all the songs that I need to do more work on for each project. Then I added a column named YTD, meaning Year To Date. Here I make a note for everything that is already done on each song. For reference, my legend is shown at the bottom of the spreadsheet, i.e. W for words, M for melody, B for backtracks and V for vocals.

In the first column under YTD, I added a WM down for each song that the words and melody is written. A WMB means that the words, melody and backtrack is done. And an added V would mean the vocals are recorded as well. I changed the color of all the cells with work finished to green. Green means good.

Now, I add more columns; one extra column for each week. Next I start to plan time slots for every task. Let's look at an example.

First song listed under The exile is Singing comes cheap. Under the YTD column I have WM, meaning the words and melody is written, and I marked it green. Every song needs to have words, melody, backtracks and vocals, i.e. I still need to plan backtracks and vocals for this song. I added a B under the next column with a heading of 13/3/10. This means I have to finish the backtracks (B) before 2013, March, the 10th. Next I added the V under the next column, meaning then that I want to finish the vocals by March the 17th.

Then I moved on to the next song and plan a time slot for all the Bs and Vs, and so on. When I get to the songs where nothing is done yet, I added slots for the words and music in one week (WM). Preferably we should not put the B and V in the same week, to give the vocalists more time to record the tracks.

I estmate that each task will take about 5 hours to complete. In a normal week, where I work a normal 40 hour week for my day job, I can fit in another 20 hours at nights to work on this project. That means I must plan such that I do not have more than 4 tasks in the same week's column. When planning time slots, always start with projects where the time slots are dependant on other commitments. I started with this plan around the Rock fable project, as that also involve some collaborations with other people.

After finishing the whole grid, I ended up with the possibility of 20 songs that will be finished and recorded by June 16th. That will be pretty good going, and most likely a bit optimistic. That is more songs than most artists or bands record in two years, and they do it full-time. Ambitious, but let's give it a shot.

So, we can summarize by saying our objective is to record 20 songs by the middle of this year.

As we go along, we may sometimes fall behind in our plan, or at other times, we may get ahead. We will keep on updating our schedule every week by marking things in red when we fall behind, or in green as we finish things off.

Keep on watching this blog to see how I progress.

 

Planning to get more done

Today we will start to do some serious planning. If you remember, we started this all when I realized that I have a problem. My problem is that I have too much to do and not getting anything done. Having too much to do and not finishng anything is just another form of procrastination. This is a very typical problem that millions of people all over the world suffer from. Lucky for me, there is a solution. It is called planning.

Before I draw up my plan of action, I have to establish the extend of what I have to plan for. Let's call this my scope. I start to define the scope first by giving it a mission statement. This is simply putting into words what I want to accomplish; into a single generic sentence.

So, what is my mission? I want to write songs and I want to record them. To be more specific, I want to write and record songs for the musical shows I am working on. Now, that sounds like a mission to me. Let me refine that into some generic words that I can put up on a signboard.

My mission is to write songs and make recordings of the songs from the musical shows I write.

Let's read that again. Not bad. Now we can start to get creative.

Now that I know what I am doing, I can start to break that down further into more detail. I am talking about musical shows I write. I have a long list of those, in various states of completion. Let's look at that list again:

1) The exile

One concept album with 16 songs dne. Nine more songs written (words and melody) to be recorded.

2) Wake not the dead

One song recorded. Three sng, words and melodies written and needs to be recorded. Nineteen more needs words, melodies, and recordings.

3) The nightingale

One song recorded. Five more, words and melodies are written and needs recordings. Twenty six more needs words, melodies, and recordings.

4) Ghost town

One song recorded. One more with words and melody. Total extend unknown.

5) Christification (bet you did not know about that one?)

Book and story in progress, but no songs yet.

6) Denise (this is just single songs)

Two songs submitted.

7) Rock fable

One song with words and melodies written. Backtracks recorded. Needs vocals. Many more to go.

 

I will leave the other activities like Protea Stage Productions off this list for now. Rock fable includes full production responsibilities (album and stage show). Butbfor the purposemof this excercize, I will listbonly the initial songs required for the promo.

Next, let's see what work needs to be done for each song. Every song needs lyrcs (or words) and a melody. Then we need to record backing tracks (guitars, drums, piano, etc.) and then we will submit it for a vocalist to do his or her job. Often it needs second lead vocals and backing vocals as well. After vocals are recorded, we spend some time on mixing it together and then upload it for general public consumption.

So many works in progress, and so much work that needs to be done on each song. We will have to prioritize. After reviewng the list, I decided to prioritized Rock fable, The exile and Wake not the dead at the top of the list. We can get quickest results with them. If we see how much we can get done on these few, and then tackle the others.

The next step is to list all the work that needs to be done. For this I will use a simple spreadsheet like the one shown here. A spreadsheet is easy to use and a very effective tool. In the next blog post I will explain my spreadsheet in detail.

 

 

 

So much to do in so little time

For somebody who is doing this while holding a pretty busy daytime job, I have far too many projects in progress.

First there is The exile. This is my main project which we are now in the process of pitching to producers.

Next there is Ghost town, a rock concert musical in development.

Then I have Wake not the dead, the horror musical. This is a musical propper, and if all goes well, I will record the songs by sometimes middel of this year.

Last on the list of musicals is A story of a nightingale. Many of the songs are written.

For all of these musicals, at least one, and sometimes many, demo songs are recorded.

Next in progress, on the production side is the farce, Bottoms up, by the Protea Stage Productions. My involvement here is more on the hand-of-all-trades and whatever-I-can-find-to-do-to-look-like-I-am-helping nature. The show will go on stage in May 2013. Later this year, around October, we will put a musical up, so watch this space. I will be much more involved in that production.

On the songwriting side, I am pitching songs for 2 projects. One I am especially keen for. This will probably turn into a 50's /Jim Steinman style rock show. The other project is pure adapting of some of my songs for a singer who plan to record an album this year.

So, if all these projects just keep moving forward and if my work gets accepted, then this year will be a very busy year. Keep watching this space.

 

Will you forever sleep

Last year (2012) James Fraser (on vocals) and I recorded a song from one of my musicals-in-progress for halloween.

You can isten to this recording on soundcloud.

This song is from the opening scene for the musical, Wake not the dead (a working title). It is a horror musical, based on the work with the same title by Johann Ludwig Tieck.

The first scene in act 1 starts with Walter bemoaning the death of his childhood lover. Brunhilda has been dead for about ten years. After her death, Walter married Swanhilda, with whom he has two wonderful little kiddies, but Walter is not happily married. Every night, he is crying and moaning next to the grave of Brunhilda.

We will not yet give the whole story away. For a teaser, you can find the original story by using google. What I can tell you now, is that this stage play will scare the wits out of most. For our musical, many small changes will be made to the plot to keep it more interesting.

The idea of horror musicals is nothing new. Probably the most famous one is Richard O'Brien's Rocky horror picture show, which became much more than just a cult classic. More recently, Stephen Sondheim had a huge success with Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Both these musicals have really, really great scores to carry them. While Rocky Horror is a hit for its bizare and amusing, Sweeney Todd is mixed with a fair amount of humor, as illustrated in the great performance of Angela Lansbury and George Hearn in the clip below.

 

Off course, Phantom of the opera can also be regarded as a horror, but most fans will rather put it in the drame / romance bin. I am sure you will be able to name many, many more, like e.g. Dracula that made it to the Broadway stages, and probably a few thousand more lurking in theaters all over. Then there are some more direct-to-movie horrors, like Hard rock zombies. Some would put Mama Mia also in this group, but now we are just confusing horror musicals with horrible musicals.