Jul 4, 20182 min read

Day 8: The Final Countdown

Updated: Mar 28, 2020

Yup. You read it. The day before the recording, man. The FRIGGIN LAST day. Anxiety was at its peak! We all had to submit our orchestrations (final version of the scores) by 5pm, so that the scores and parts could all be printed and ready by Thursday.

We also had the last mentoring sessions with Chris going on, as well as orchestrating sessions with both Juanjo and Francesco, helping us with our notation and orchestration ideas for our compositions. They were SO great, guys! Seriously, they spent the ENTIRE day just going around helping all of us, they barely had time for a lunch break.

None of us were required to come in, since we didn't have any classes on Wednesday so that we could prepare for the recording on Thursday. Buuuuut, because we all became such good friends and had a great place to work in the conference room we used all week, most of us went there anyways, all sat down, working on the composition on our laptops. Everyone was pretty focused, sitting there in silence working on our own thing, but concurrently makin' jokes and havin' fun, you know?

Most of our day consisted of that, till around 5pm of course, when we had to submit all our scores. That.. was SO. Friggin. Stressful. My god. It was like a panic room in there. And of course, when you're about to submit something important and close to the deadline, EVERYTHING starts going wrong. Your notation software starts bugging out, suddenly your score moves stuff on its own - dear god.

But, you know what? We all managed to do it! Some of us finished later and had to print it themselves, BUT we all managed - everyone's scores were ready before the next day. The BIG day, man. The orchestra recording day. The absolute excitement of just the THOUGHT of having an orchestra play my own piece - jeezus. Jeeeeeezuuuuuus. It's an amazing thing, man. When all the sounds in your head come through by live musicians, just wow.

After submitting the scores, I had the one-to-one session with Chris. It's so wonderful the way he cares about all his students so much. He just puts his heart and soul into every lesson, every single student. You wouldn't expect a big-shot Hollywood composer to do that, would you? Well, he does, and it's great. He listened to every single one of everyone's recordings, commented upon what we need to improve and what's great in our work, and gave us very specialized career advice.

Next: recording our pieces. Holy potato.