A couple of really nice, fun stuff going on at the moment.

On the jingle front I have had some interesting challenges. Standing out the most were jingles for  City Fencing and Park and Ride for Leicestershire Council - yeah, councils do some good stuff from time to time! More on those in a minute.

Other stuff includes some of my music will be appearing on the game Wurm Online from next monday, and I have also been putting together some atmopheres for forests, lakes, mines and so on to give the game a bit of a lift.

Talking of games, I am also starting to look at putting together my own MMO. Tentatively called Foundation this will be a very long project indeed, but also very interesting. More on that as time goes on.

Back on the music front, I have been asked by a runner up at last Years Virgin Media Shorts film competition to write the music for this years entry - a very nice honour, and I am working on that now. Also writing some middle eastern music for Crimson Cats, a company that records spoken word CDs and run by a long time client of mine - we worked together on some Sherlock Holmes dramas back in the ... well, a long, long time ago!

Back to those jingles, Liecestershire Council gave me the challenge of putting together a new jingle to promote Park 'n' Ride, especially towards family and younger people. They wanted to use Wheels on the Bus, which was fair enough. However, I was concerned that it could potentially be too young and not pick up on families where the kids are young teens and the parents have stopped being attracted to nursery rhymes. They and the creative were kind enough to give me my head on this one, and so I came up with a Surfin' USA kind of arrangement of this traditional song. Chris Madin took the top half of the vocal range, while I took the safer bottom half and I am really pleased with the result!

City Fencing posed another problem. The client was really keen on just standing out and was concerned that it should have a bit of fun involved. His company name is a touch corporate and he want to hit domestic customers too. First thing I did was come up with the rather daft but accurate line of "City Fencing, Fencing is what we do." Didn't seem much point in beating around the bush with that one really. Unfortunately for the clients sense of humour I have been listening recently to a bit of Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks. This gypsey jazz influenced band from the seventies never forgot to have fun, and the question/answer style of vocals between Hicks and his amazing female backing vocalists was wonderful. So, I thought I would nick a trick from him, though rather than gypsy, I kind of went oompah!