Thursday, March 18, 2010

Traveling Plans - Aquarium - Tribute Album

My dreams of traveling around Japan are about to come true. I'll be traveling to Tokyo, Osaka, Nara, Kobe and Kyoto with my friends Elaine and Coralie. I leave tomorrow morning and will be gone for 10 days. We managed to find a really inexpensive, albeit somewhat slow, way to travel by train and bus so the trip is going to be barely affordable for me...maybe. I won't be able to splurge on souvenirs or food while I'm away but being in these amazing cities with good friends will be enough.

I won't go into any great detail about our plans right now, but expect a complete update on how the trip went when I get back. I'll take a tone of pictures of course :)

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Marine World
I went with two of my English conversation students to the Marine World aquarium yesterday. They treated me and Jack to lunch at a really fancy restaurant at the hotel there, and also payed our entrance fees to the aquarium. That was so nice of them to do. I'm tempted to give them their next English lesson for free...then again, we'll see if I still feel that way after I've returned from my vacation with no money.

Here are a few photos from Marine World:





Hiroyuki Iwatsuki Tribute Album

A few weeks before leaving for Japan I was contacted by someone from the site Game Music 4 All about contributing an arrangement to a tribute album they were organizing for the 20 year video game music legend Hiroyuki Iwatsuki (I had contributed an arrangement to the Super Mario RPG Tribute Album a while back). I told him that I would love to help but I had very little time since I was so busy getting ready for Japan. He insisted and gave me a few options for short tracks that I could arrange. I gave them a listen and decided on the track "Victory" from the old game Mitsume ga Tooru.

Anyway, I completed the arrangement (completely acoustic) and sent the file to him. The other day I was thinking about that track and realized that I hadn't heard any word on the album. I emailed the director and he informed me that it is scheduled to be released online on March 24th! I've been busy the past couple of days sending him images to use for the slide show that will play as the track is streaming on the page; I wrote liner notes for the track as well. He also decided to use my arrangement and photos for a pre-release promotional video for the album.

I'll leave you a link to the site here today. Remember, the album will be streaming on the website for free starting March 24th so be sure to go there and look for mine.

http://www.iwadon.com/

Here is a link to where the promotional video will be once it's done. There is one up already, mine will be a subsequent video. Keep checking for it.

http://vimeo.com/album/196567

And finally, here is a link to the blog that contains the official announcement for the album. New info will be most likely be added here in the days leading up to and after the album's release.

http://gamemusic4all.com/wordpress/

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That's it for now. I'll get back in touch when I return :)

Oh, and the following picture has no explanation. Enjoy...

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