Jessie Leov Music

music

New year, new opportunities #2019

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Having already made our way into the second month of the New Year, I feel like it’s time to stock of what has happened so far.

January was an interesting month. It wasn’t as productive as I had hoped but that may have been due to the New Year holiday period, my mid-month 8-day trip to the North Island, and my 4-day stint in Christchurch/Auckland at the end of the month.

Despite my travels I did a couple of gigs with my solo singer/pianist hat on and also completed a few projects for clients. I was fortunate to be contracted to compose and produce the music for this short promo video for Little Pig Building Company, created by Lifeform Labs.

It was a great experience and I hope to continue building up a portfolio of music for screen this year. My goal is to start gaining professional experience in the screen industry (film/TV) as I would love to get into production sound or post-production music/sound. This year is all about searching for opportunities and saying yes!

While I’m currently based in Nelson, I’ll be taking a 5-day trip to Auckland/Hawkes Bay to reunite with my quartet, run some school workshops and rehearse for the upcoming Sweet Adelines Quartet contest in Dunedin which we’re competing in for the third time.

Alongside this I’ll be working on finishing the score for my musical theatre collaboration ‘Take Back The Universe’, with my friend and playwright/composer/songwriter/musician Marlon Richards, which will be getting some workshop exposure later this year! This will take place in Wellington where I’m most likely heading sometime in the coming months.

Basically I have plenty to keep me occupied, most of which doesn’t bring in much dosh at this very moment but I’m willing to keep putting in the hard yards and build up my network so I can live that freelance self-employed creative life! That’s all for now Xx

Composing Reel

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Here is compilation of clips featuring my original music, written for the documentary Birds of a Feather by Working Edge Pictures. I was able to collaborate with director Nina Wells to write some tracks for this piece, and it was a superb learning experience for me. I worked from guide tracks that she sent, and wrote a bunch of different tracks mostly centered around piano, that fit in with different scenes from the film. Hoping it’s the first of many such collaborations that I get to experience :)

The full-length tracks can be found on my soundcloud here.

On the radio TWICE in a week!

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Hey everyone!

First of all, if you haven’t heard my new song ‘Vows’ please head over and have a listen here!

It was super fun to make, very hard work and took about 3 or 4 ENTIRE days to finish. It’s the first song I’ve ever fully done on Ableton so it was a learning curve but hey gotta start somewhere.

So the first exciting radio-related event happened on the 25th March, when I got a txt from a friend saying that one of my songs was playing on KIWI FM! I was pretty stoked and managed to tune in and hear the end of it – it was my song Divine from the 2012 Play it Strange Songwriting Competition CD. So that was pretty awesome!

Then just last Friday (3 days later), I was woken up by a call at 7:30am saying I was on the shortlist for the ‘Sowing the Seeds of Success’ contest and I may or may not be rung by Mike Hosking within the hour. I had applied for this the week before, just coz you know you have to do these things just on the off chance, and written a huge page long, essentially like, biography of my life relating to music. And then I listed all the musical gear and equipment that I had bought to ‘support my career’, and I listed the few items I could think of at the time that I was really really wanting to get to help me record better music. These being fancy studio headphones, a midi controller keyboard, Logic Pro and Ableton Live Suite (recording/production softwares).

So long story short, Mike called me, we talked for a bit on air, he played some of my a-capella song See You Again (!!) And then I won all the gear I’d asked for! Needless to say it took me quite a few hours to calm down and become a normal person again after this happened. The adrenaline was pumping big time. So a huge thank you to Newstalk ZB and ASB Bank! I’m just waiting on a call from the bank and then I can hopefully head out and get my gear! I’M SO VERY EXCITED!

You can listen to the interview below:

I can’t believe we’re already up to the 5th week of the semester – only a couple of weeks to go before I head home for mid-semester break. I’m so happy to be back at it though, fully immersed in the music world and spending lots of time with my amazing and talented friends in Auckland!

I will be keeping you updated with new songs, other exciting events that may occur, etc etc, throughout the year! We are off to a good start.

Oh yeah, SONG OF THE WEEK below. I am in love.

Peace and love,

Jessie x