00:00
00:00
BlazingDragon
Trevor Crookston @BlazingDragon

Male

United States

Joined on 2/4/06

Level:
6
Exp Points:
305 / 400
Exp Rank:
> 100,000
Vote Power:
4.60 votes
Audio Scouts
2
Rank:
Civilian
Global Rank:
> 100,000
Blams:
0
Saves:
6
B/P Bonus:
0%
Whistle:
Normal
Trophies:
7
Medals:
38

BlazingDragon's News

Posted by BlazingDragon - June 22nd, 2012


Bubbowrap just released a short film called Mural featuring my first film score! The animation is beautiful, so please check it out, rate it, and comment. Let's get a ton of views for this, as I believe it deserves some attention!

Watch on Vimeo
See it on Newgrounds

Also, I just broke 600 fans on Newgrounds! Thank you all so much for the support, encouraging messages, and reviews. It takes a while, but I read and respond to every single one. If you want feedback on your own work, message me and I'll see what I can do.

I love this site. :3


Posted by BlazingDragon - May 22nd, 2012


Cartoon Network recently contracted Daniel Sun to reskin his game Armed With Wings: Culmination for their series Young Justice. My piece, Train of Thought, is the game's title theme! It's awesome hearing my music extending beyond the audio portal to more distant regions of the internet. :)

Young Justice: Shadow Mission

On a similar note, I recently composed the score for a short film called Mural by fellow newgrounder Bubbowrap. While the film will not be on the net for a while due to film festival rules, you can check out the music I wrote:

Mural OST - Drifting

School is out and I'm feeling creative. Expect more music soon, and please contact me if you would like music for a project you are working on.

PS. I'm working on a remix of Gerudo Valley from Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and it will be totally different than anything I've ever posted. Let's just say that it will be outside of my usual genre. Should be done sometime in the next week or two. It's pretty epic-sounding so far. :D


Posted by BlazingDragon - May 19th, 2012


First, school is out. Huzzah!

Second, I just scored the music for a short 3D animated film and uploaded the track. Please give it a listen.

I leave you now with the following awesome video:


Posted by BlazingDragon - May 13th, 2012


After one more class this week, I'll be finished with my first year of college! School has kept me busy but has taught me a lot. I'm finished with all four music theory classes (I tested out of the first two) and will be starting Ear Training III in the fall. Piano lessons have helped me recover from poor, self-taught technique, and I even got to conduct a piece at the last choir concert.

Hopefully I'll kick out at least a few compositions over the summer. It'd be fun to do another video game remix, so if you have a recommendation, let's hear it.

And here is a new loop I made last night...

http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/485576?up dated=1


Posted by BlazingDragon - February 24th, 2012


It's been way too long, but I finally posted a new piece! It is a nocturne for solo piano. Constructive criticism would be awesome! And if I get enough feedback on it, I might be inspired to upload something else soon...

Enjoy!

http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/473032

Edit:
Oh, and here is another song! :D
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/473312


Posted by BlazingDragon - February 9th, 2012


Redesign=Awesome.

Seriously, the project system is spectacular! One thing I despised with the old system is how you couldn't credit a co-author for audio. Me and Tamadrum would do collabs and have to rock-paper-scissors over who got to post them. I kid you not. But that's no longer a problem! Not only can you credit other musicians with this system, but you can assign "managers" with the ability to respond to reviews. The fact that multiple authors can respond to reviews on one piece is really convenient, especially when there are a lot of reviews...

Oh, and you can now split all 10 cents of a song's ad revenue between multiple collaborators!

All in all, I'm pretty excited about these changes, although I haven't found a convenient way to check for new reviews. Does the notification system handle those? That would be amazing.

Oh, and I should be putting up a new piano piece in the next day or two! Yep.

What do you think of the redesign? Yea or nay?


Posted by BlazingDragon - December 10th, 2011


Hey everyone! I deeply apologize for the lack of original pieces for such a long time, but here is a news update.

This summer, I wrecked my brother's car in a rather unfortunate accident. While I came out with just a scratch, the car...Well, uh, let's just say that it will never be driven again! I still owe him a few hundred dollars and feel obligated to pay him back asap.

To achieve this end, I have decided not to return for my second semester of community college in the spring. Instead, I'll work full time to get my debt paid off in full. I'll also be throwing myself into hours of daily piano practice! I am now taking lessons from a spectacular teacher, and the amount that I am learning is incredible. Once my debt is paid off (around four months from now), I'll be able to invest in more equipment such as decent microphones. :)

So now that I won't have school suffocating me to death in the spring, more music should be coming this way! And now I leave you with this.

Taking a break from college and pursuing music


Posted by BlazingDragon - October 19th, 2011


Have you ever spent so long looking for the right way to do something that you never got around to doing it at all? Many of us have. Perhaps you want to lose weight but are overwhelmed by the number of diets out there, all of them different!

"Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper. It takes up to ten hours to digest food, and...."

"Eat several small meals a day in order to keep your metabolism constantly burning, so..."

You are constantly bombarded with contradictory messages such as these. The worst part? They all seem reasonable! So rather than diet, you become swept up in all the options and put off starting until you find the best route. In the end, that magical diet is never started and you are no better off. Does this resonate with you at all?

I call this the "overload principle." The staggering array of options available in a given situation causes a person to operate with overly cautious tendencies. The brain seemingly becomes overloaded by the sheer volume of choices and freezes up like a computer from 2001 trying to run World of War Craft.

For me, learning to sight read has been the unfortunate area to overload. The whole process seemed so impossibly tedious, and yet so many people around me are amazing at it. I asked my high school choir piano accompanist how she acquired her monstrous sight reading skills, to which she answered, "I don't know. I've just always been good at it." This made me wonder if it was just a natural tendency? After all, it seemed as though most people seemed to be either good at sight reading or playing by ear; rarely do I come across a person skilled in both. Still, I knew I could improve.

I thought, "I have a good ear, so I'll have to work a lot harder to gain sight reading skills. I need to find a good method to improving." Hours were spent on google reading one article after another. Those hours were filled with "Only $19.99!" advertisements and companies claiming that you could be a master sight read in no time flat through their software. It seemed like there was no real solid information on learning to sight read; gimmick software was all I could find.

Today, it finally struck me that I had wasted countless hours of my life searching for a shortcut when the solution was right in front of my nose:

Suck it up and practice!

The reason for a lack of articles on how to be a great sight reader was because the best way might just be to dive in and do it! Sure, there are different little tricks and approaches, just like there are various diets. But the main way to learn at least begins with just doing it, just like a good diet begins with exercising more and eating less. That's just common sense.

I've come to the conclusion that sight reading is a lot like text reading. Think of it this way:

-Individual notes are like single letters
-Chords are combinations of notes, like words are combinations of letters
-Phrases are strings are notes/chords, like sentences are strings of words/letters
-Sections in a piece (A section, B section, etc.) are made of multiple phrases, as paragraphs are made of multiple sentences
-Complete pieces are made of of sections, as essays are made up of paragraphs or books are made of chapters

When I first started learning to read, it was tedious. I had to memorize 26 symbols (52 if you include capitals and lower case) with corresponding sounds. When I saw the character "a," I had to spend several moments trying to recall what sound that made. This is akin to looking at a note on a staff and figuring out, "That's the third line up...That's a B." It took hours to learn this, but in time, I could identify letters without thinking.

Then, I had to string letters together to form words. When I saw the three symbols C, A, and T next to one another, I had to sound them out individually before being able to figure out the word. In music, this is like looking at the note Bb, D, F and thinking, "Okay...that's a Bb major triad."After a while, I got pretty quick at picking apart those three letter words.

Next was stringing those words into sentences such as, "The cat ran to the hat by the bat." I certainly was not able to do it in regular, smooth rhythm. It was broken up; "The cat....ra..n....to the....hat...by..." That's like starting to sight read short phrases rather than individual chords. At first, you have to do it slow, and the rhythm might not quite be there as your developing early sight reading skills.

By now though, I don't even think when I read. Do you have to think, "Okay, that word has T, H, E...sound it out..." NO! You just see the pattern and the sound of the word automatically comes to mind. I don't even look at individual words- my eyes skim across entire lines and process all of the information without thinking about any of the individual components. I can even read ahead of what I am speaking aloud.

This is what great sight readers tell me about their abilities! They don't look at notes are even chords; their eyes just glance across pages and their hands produce music based on patterns on the page- patterns that, after years of sight reading, their brains have learned to automatically identify.

So why does reading sheet music seem more difficult than reading a book? Well, because we spend much more time reading books and text than music. Just think; you live in a world bombarded with text! Commercials, billboards, magazines, books, t-shirts, closed-captions, newspapers, school assignments, work reports, labels, recipes, nutrition facts, social networking websites- the list goes on! The average person spends hours every single day reading text of some kind. It's almost to the point of being unavoidable!

The thing is, some people have treated music this way, and that is the "secret." At a young age, they learned notes on flashcards. Then came easy, one line melodies that they struggled through. As those become easy, chordal accompaniments came into the picture. Easy pieces were learned. Piece after piece, they expanded their abilities and skills until sight reading became a natural reaction rather than a highly conscious effort, similar to how we can read entire pages of books only to realize we didn't pay attention to any of it. One doesn't begin reading War and Peace right off the bat. That would be ludicrous! Rather, they start with Green Eggs and Ham, move on to Captain Underpants, graduate to Junie B Jones, and years later enjoy the works of Shakespeare on leisure evenings by the fireplace.

When it comes to brain overload, the best thing to do might just be to jump right in and do something. Take what little bit you know you can do to lose weight, for example, and go for it. Cross each bridge as it comes. This certainly applies to my sight reading; I need to just suck it up and practice!

Can you think of a time that you have suffered from brain overload, and did you do anything to address it? I'd love to hear your thoughts!


Posted by BlazingDragon - August 13th, 2011


Hey everyone! Today, I discovered the magic of the website that is Scribd! This service allows me to seamlessly deliver sheet music to the world in a more efficient manner than individually e-mailing pieces out to people. From now on, all of my sheet music will be available on my profile there. Plus, you don't need to sign up or anything! You can view the sheet music directly on the site or download it in multiple formats, no strings attached. :D

http://www.scribd.com/trevor_crookston

Additionally, I just finished transcribing my Serenade of Storms, which just became a stage on Flash Flash Revolution. If you're interested in sheets, here they are:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/62235982/Ser enade-of-Storms

All the sheet music that I've made to this point is available for free download. However, I'm considering charging a small fee on new pieces of sheet music in the future to help supplement my income during college. Would you buy a piece of sheet music for around $2.50? What would be reasonable to you?

Have a great day, peeps! :D


Posted by BlazingDragon - June 2nd, 2011


I must apologize to all of my beloved supporters and fans. In the past, I always made the claim that I'd respond to every single review, and I did for a long time. After Power Star 4 though, my review count shot through the roof, and I became overwhelmed. Since then, I have become very lazy about responding.

However, I decided to go back and respond to every one. Now, I have responded to over 1,200 reviews! Things have slowed down, and new reviews are trickling in at once or twice a week. I believe that this is because of my sluggishness in responding and the lack of consistent music for some time. I am renewing my commitment to respond to each review that comes my way to the best of my ability, and I shall be composing much more!

All of the support that I have received from the Newgrounds community has touched my heart and inspired me. Some of the reviews have been astounding and nearly moved me to tears. I can't tell you how much I appreciate them.

On a slightly different topic, message me your email address if you would like any sheet music for free! I'd be happy to send it your way. Also, I am taking requests for projects, flash or otherwise. And if you just want to talk, shoot me a message and we can swap skype names! :)

Again, thank you all for your support. I love you guys! :D

Sincerely,
Trevor Crookston (BlazingDragon)