May 8, 2021

The Journey

Hello!

Thanks for coming back to see us! Today, we’d like to talk a little bit about some of the things we had to think about in order to launch a project like New Melody Trio. One of the more challenging parts, believe it or not, was deciding on the title of the songs.

Haven’t you wondered how people do that? Not only song titles, but books, movies, band names (that’s a whole other topic!), restaurants and bars… please share your personal experiences on this!

In the beginning, of course Andrew had titles referencing each song, such as “a minor.” At the end, we did stick with one of the original titles. Wanna guess which one? Here’s a hint: not “Vivaldi Matrix.” Ha ha.

Google drive has been a great way to organize our thoughts “on paper.” We created folders for each topic and loaded them up with items to discuss. So, there’s one called “Song Titles.” I feel like anyone who has had this task can relate. In this folder is a document where we just list a bunch of words that come to mind about the specific song. Then, at our weekly Zoom meetings, we hash it out. Some days, to no avail. Often, it will be a combination of ideas that culminate into the final choice. In the case of “Vivaldi Matrix,” Christine really liked the word “matrix” and we circled all possibilities around it. For a while, we were stuck on “Brooklyn” being a part of the title because the video was shot on a special rooftop in Brooklyn overlooking the Manhattan skyline. But, at the end, it really came down to resonating the music which is Vivaldi-inspired. And, voila! We will get more into the essence of the song in our next blog.

But now, I want to introduce our website designer, Henry Wang. Not only is Henry like one of the most incredible violinists ever, but he is just one of those humans that you feel so lucky to have in your life. We have played together on a countless number of awesome projects — most recently the Grammy Award WINNING album on Chandos Records, “The Prison” by Dame Ethel Smyth where he was the concertmaster of Experiential Orchestra. During the lockdown, I became a fan-girl of a super fun series that he co-directed on Instagram called “Basic Pitch.” Somehow, in following their activities, I learned about his mad web design skills. In fact, that’s how we hooked up our logo, too! The same person that designed their logo made ours: Emi Sato. It first started out with Christine sketching some cool drawings with the letters NMT embedded in them. But, essentially what we wanted was an image of our silhouette like the Charlie's Angels logo, but replacing the guns with our instruments. The added bonus was the beaming sun rays in the backdrop, which is a visual highlight you see throughout “Vivaldi Matrix.”

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It was a pretty fun process coordinating meetings and emails with Emi in Japan with all the time zones (Los Angeles, CA. >Alberta, Canada, >NYC, NY > Tokyo, Japan). But, with Henry’s help, we managed more than fine!

Henry gave us two options to choose from: SquareSpace and Webflow. We gravitated towards Webflow, naturally as it’s really geared towards an immersive visual experience which we loved. This, however posed a slight challenge as we sadly didn’t have a whole lot of content to work with other than the already edited videos. Somehow, digging a bit into our archives of candid photos, we were able to find a handful of select images that were high def enough to use. It really helped that Henry was not only clear in what he needed from us, but super efficient in the turn around and delivery. He made what can often be a grueling and frustrating process, inspiring and even enjoyable! You can see for yourself by checking out his glossy website: https://www.henrywang.io.

We are so grateful to have such amazing collaborators and can’t wait to share these videos with you. On that note, I think I will sign off for now.