New Track: Christmas Medley 2018 for Grace Assembly of God Singapore

It's the Christmas season, and I want to wish all my readers a very merry Christmas!



This track is an instrumental medley of a few Carols and songs:

1. Joy to the World
2. Hark the Herald Angels Sing
3. Lord I Want Nothing More (an original worship song from Grace Assembly of God Singapore)
4. We Wish you a Merry Christmas

This is a music video project that my church is producing. It features is a medley of a few songs, some are carols, some are original songs composed by the church. The MTV will feature church staff singing and a few pastors saying some greetings in between the different pieces.

I was asked to creatively arrange and plan progressions of the transitions, constrained to the number of bars present in the guide track. my arrangement will also set the style and mood of each piece. It means I can set a traditional piece to disco or EDM, or hip hop, etc. i have a bit of free-play.

Before the media team goes out to shoot people singing, they need a "guide track" for timing, duration and tempo, so they know much to shoot, how long (duration) to edit, and what to show in the MTV, while I go off arranging the music.

Here I'll elaborate a bit on the challenges I faced.

- creating smooth transitions in tempo at portions that had to go slow then bringing it back up again naturally and smoothly for the finale ending on a high

- making smooth transitions on key changes which had a lot to do with Chord and scale changes, and that must make sense.

- this one may not be so apparent if done "well". It is to fit each transition within a fixed number of bars.
this challenge is similar but not as tough as something I also do: writing music to picture. Take that first transition from a capella hark the angels which I had the slower and then the rock version. The transition is 12 bars. Coming from a pop biased background like myself, my mind is mostly wired to multiples of 8 bars, it was a challenge to fill up a musical space with the usual 8, 16, bars etc.

- realistic and believable arrangement/"recording" /programming (whatever you call the process of composing with virtual instruments on a computer with no "real players" native to those instruments.) Since I also play-in those parts myself in the end, I need to know how each instrument would need to sound, in the context of the music style.

- finally, something that I personally try to achieve whenever I do "cover versions" is to create a combination of style and chord progression of the song that is somewhat different from the common/original version. That makes my time spent more worthwhile since I have get to leave my fingerprint on it in the end. But of course, in my years of doing arrangements, I started off with trying to replicate and imitate. That definitely has some learning value in itself.