Monthly Archives: October 2013

New Song: Cherry Blossom Bosoms (pt 1)

Here’s the first movement of a new piano piece I’m working on, Cherry Blossom Bosoms.  This piece represents a very different approach to music-making for me: I wrote  it as sheet music (Finale) first, and then learned to play it from that score.  I feel that this method made Cherry Blossom Bosoms come out of my musical box at least a bit — when I sit down at a piano, I generally play the same kind of pianoy stuff, because that’s what my fingers know how to play (I don’t have formal training, and piano isn’t my primary instrument; I mainly learned by transcribing some of my guitar pieces, reading a little bit of sheet music, and jamming around from there).  It also made me improve, at least a bit, at piano: I previously hadn’t written any pieces with very different rhythms for each hand, and it took a lot of practice to be able to play the piece comfortably. The method also came as a matter of necessity: I wrote the piece in January 2013, when living in Japan with my girlfriend, where I had no musical instruments, just my laptop.  That was very much an intentional situation, as I was curious to try “pure composition” (and not ship anything to Japan), and I’m very happy with the result.

Without further ado, here’s the audio:
And the sheet music, in its original Finale format, and as a jpg:
JonoForbes_CherryBlossomBosomsPt1_Score

Please feel free to reproduce, perform, arrange, alter, etc this piece, but send some credit this way 🙂

I have just about finished the second movement (/revision) as well, that’ll be here real soon.

Ahoy! It’s a blog!

Allo, and welcome to the Jono corner of the Internets!  I’m trying a new thing here, just a blogspace for absolutely anything that comes to mind: music, photos, games, thoughts, life, so on.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  I’m Jono, co-director of Defective Studios, a small independent game company where  I spend most of my time programming, mainly on our first big indie release Gimbal Cop, and also doing game design and some art.  So this blog will mostly not be about that.  This is a space I’ve been hankering for for a bit, where I can express anything else.  When I’m not working on Defective stuff (or hanging with people, or by my lonesome, an important part of any secret introvert’s life), I also make music on guitar and piano, take photos, and write longwinded idea-rants.  So look forward to that.  I’ve tried the blog thing before, and fell into my constant trap of sucking at keeping up at things, so I’m gonna take it slow, not make a big deal of it, and put up whatever I feel like.  I hope you, the hypothetical reader-listener-watcher (if you build it, they will come??), enjoy.