Your Composer Quest quest, should you choose to accept it, is to arrange a pop song or movie/TV theme for the Twin Cities Trio (Maia Hamann on bassoon, Karen Jennings on oboe, and Mary Beth Huttlin on clarinet). They're looking for fun tunes to perform for children in schools.
Have you ever wanted to learn the basics of music composition? Audio production?
In an effort to get the Composer Quest podcast heard, I'm offering a free music composition or production lesson to one random Facebook fan and one random Twitter follower.
Join me in the inaugural episode of my new podcast, Composer Quest. I'll be picking the brains of composers and songwriters to gain some insight into writing music. For the first episode, I interviewed Mitchell Johnson from Spencer McGillicutty.
Is opera a dying art? Maybe, maybe not. If it is, the English National Opera has defibrilator paddles poised and ready. The ENO has started a mini-opera competition, and they're hoping to rejuvenate opera for a younger generation through an online crowdsourced project.
Scriptwriters, composers, and Continue reading... 
A mysterious, webaholic music lover known only as "Spin" once took it upon himself to start a songwriting challenge, free and open to anyone in the world. The SpinTunes challenge usually has around 35 participants, who are pitted against each other in four rounds of songwriting. The judges include Continue reading... 
After a grueling but supremely fun month of writing and recording, Nick Syman and I finished our album for the RPM Challenge. The album spans a ton of different sounds and genres, and even eras. The one-month limit forced us to work with ideas we might have otherwise thrown away. And I'm glad we kept Continue reading... 
It's official. My friend Nick Syman and I are crazy. We've taken on the RPM Challenge, which means we're going to have to write and record an entire album in the month of February. We had our first jam session on Wednesday, and Jeff Schwinghammer was there to film the process:
We hadn't really Continue reading...