Thought I’d share my demo reel, which I use for commercial gigs. It features work I did for The Coca-Cola Company, Hilton Hotels and a video game score for Cogent Education. There’s also a pop tune at the end for good measure. Enjoy!

If you’d like Dr. Mitchell to score your next commercial project, contact him at davidmitchellcomposer@gmail.com

Tammy Evans Yonce will release her debut album soon. Dr. Yonce is a flutist and professor of music at South Dakota State University.

One of the tracks on Dreams Grow Like Slow Ice is my original composition, “Angularities”, for solo glissando-headjoint flute. I wrote this piece specifically for Dr. Yonce, and I’m honored that she has included on this CD. Looking forward to the release. You can preordered below.

Preorder her debut album here: https://tammyevansyonce.bandcamp.com/album/dreams-grow-like-slow-ice

Proud to announce, themusiccompositionblog made Feedspot’s “Top 15 Music Composition Blogs”. Yay!!!

Here’s a link to view the list:

Go here to see more from Feedspot:

https://blog.feedspot.com/

“River Run” captures the spirit of a wild, white water rafting trip in the summer of 2017. My family and I took a guided tour down the Ocoee River, specifically a section built for the 1996 Olympic Games, which runs through the Ocoee Gorge in the Chattahoochee National Forest. It features the longest stretch of class III and IV rapids in the country. We had a great time, but the raft overturned throwing us into fast moving rapids with sharp rocks. We came out of it unscathed, but it was a harrowing experience none the less.

Xylophone and marimba create the feeling of swift currents underlying foreboding melodic contours. Splashy percussion sounds like waves crashing on rocks, while three distinct melodic themes represent specific rapids on the Ocoee.

“River Run” features progress tonality meaning it starts in the key of C Phrygian and ends in the key of G minor without returning to the original key. This technique was made popular in the 19^th century by romantic composers including Mahler, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms and Mendelssohn.

Click on the photo below or here to watch the video.

My latest pop tune, “Ice Cream”, was inspired by Rick James and Prince. It’s an electro-funk composition with a super catchy beat.

This is my first pop tune available on all major streaming services, see the links below to check it out.

I thought I’d share what I learned about the process.

The publication process:

1. Have it mixed and mastered professionally. It makes a difference, especially when streaming on different platforms. The mastering engineer will add correct metadata, so it can be tracked and monetized.
2. Register it with either BMI or ASCAP. I’m a member of ASCAP. They will give you a registration number connected to the metadata in your track.
3. Publish it through CD Baby or any other publishing company. CD Baby charges a one-time, $35 fee for a single or $50 for an album. They’ll need your registration number from ASCAP or BMI to track downloads and streaming.
4. Once it’s published, it’ll can take several days or several weeks for your song to first appear on Apple Music, iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Tidal and all the rest. CD Baby will track the streams for you and send a check each quarter.
5. Next, you got to promote it through paid advertising, digital radio, terrestrial radio and/or social media. That’s where the real work begins. Nobody will find it unless you push it.

iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/ice-cream/1313444213?i=1313444262

Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/0UtiWf5dvuz0F0cRLVlm22

CDbaby:
http://store.cdbaby.com/cd/davidmitchell4

I created this PowerPoint for HUM 125: Popular Music in America. It covers Chapter 9 in Michael Campbell’s textbook entitled Popular Music in America: The Beat Goes On. It contains links to listening examples and covers rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, the search for the first rock ‘n’ roll record.

I created these slides for HUM 125, a humanities course at the Atlanta Institute of Music and Media. It focuses on popular music since 1950 in America. These slides go with the book by Michael Campbell entitled “Popular Music In America: The Beat Goes On”. There are listening links to all examples and much more. This particular set of slides covers chapter 1 in the book, which discusses style elements and active listening using Maybellene by Chuck Berry.

This piece started out as a variation on “Clapping Music” by Steve Reich and quickly became something totally different. It was created using a step sequencer object in MAX filtered using a Lemur app in Ableton. I added percussion and a second synth part in Pro Tools. The open-source video is by Brad Bell. Enjoy!

Here’s an interesting rendition of Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music”. If your unfamiliar with this piece, it’s two identical rhythmic patterns in 12/8 time. They start at the same time, but after eight measures, the second pattern starts an eighth note later putting them “out of phase”. You can see this happening in the matrix object in the video. The phasing process is repeated every eight measures (creating some very interesting rhythmic interplay) until they become “in phase” once again. I plan to create a series of variations using this particular Max patch.

This piece is typically performed with real musicians. I decided to create an electronic patch as an experiment to learn more about MAX and its matrix object. Once the patch has been created, it’s a snap to adjust the matrix and create new rhythmic patterns.

Prince fans, take heart. According to an article on HuffPo, a surprise new EP containing six unreleased tracks recorded between 2006 and 2008 will be released this Friday, April 21, 2017. It will be available on Apple Music, and the title track, “Deliverance” is already available to stream on a number of services.

The producer, Ian Boxill has been working on this music over the last year and planned the release to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Prince’s Death. Paisley Park and Prince’s estate have filed a lawsuit claiming the producer is “trying to exploit one or more songs for his personal gain”.

We’ll see what happens. I’m just glad we have some new tunes from The Purple One!