"MOVING FORWARD": NEW PRODUCTION LIBRARY MUSIC ALBUM OUT NOW

Recently released: a new collection of original production music by Mike Hallenbeck, available from Opening Line Music Group and such sub-publishers as BMG. Recent placements inlclude broadcast news and variety programming in the Nehterlands.

Entitled “Moving Forward”, the album proceeds from a rootsy folk-rock approach featuring chunky rhythms that drive strummed acoustic guitar, wistful piano melodies, and chiming pedal steel counterpoint. The tracks call to mind late 70s folk rock and contemporary Americana, with a dash of the Feelies and perhaps “Reckoning”-era R.E.M. sprinkled in.

A few standout tracks here, excerpted from the album’s Dutch outlet:

Reimagined

Moving Forward

Push the Envelope

Reaching Out

With a little luck, you’ll hear these underscoring home improvement shows and life insurance ads before too long! Enjoy.

More production music by Mike Hallenbeck

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KEEP DULUTH CLEAN: CUSTOM MUSIC, SOUND EDIT + MIX FOR PSA

Duluth-based animator Brian Barber brought me aboard to compose original music, edit sound and mix this PSA for the Keep Duluth Clean project, a collaboration between Loll Designs and Flint Group. I cooked up an original music track (more on that below) and augmented Brian’s sound effects with some of my own— for the pop cans thrown into the waste basket, I eventually wound up recording an aluminum can bouncing off the two-wheel cart in my storage space, since (surprisingly) I couldn’t find the right kind of metal-on-metal impact in my library. Oh, and the guy yelling “Ain’t that the truth!” toward the beginning is me.

Below: a music-only rendition of the project. The creative direction asked for bossa nova— Esquivel came up— but the reference tracks provided were things like Henry Mancini’s “The Baby Elephant Walk” and “Why Wait” by Perez Prado, so I figured we wanted something kitschy that would match the whimsy of Barber’s characters and settings, but a bit more “square” than Esquivel per se.

A couple of minor revisions on both the audio and visual ends, and we were good to go. A quick and easy project. Good times.

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More music + sound by Mike Hallenbeck for animation

More work by Mike Hallenbeck for corporate video

More work by Mike Hallenbeck for TV spots

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ORIGINAL MUSIC PLACEMENT: "HOTEL RULES", NET 5

An original musical composition that I co-wrote with Dan Luedke recently placed on the Dutch reality show “Hotel Rules”, broadcast on the Net 5 network. According to the show’s web page (via Google Translate), the premise of the show is that “couples with a bed & breakfast remodel each other's company… Hotel Rules is a spin-off from House Rules NL. In this program too, the couples do not know each other and remodel each other's property on the basis of a few 'hotel rules'... In each episode, four couples deal with the bed and breakfast of the other couple… A professional jury assesses the results. Ultimately, the best couple wins 25,000 euros.”

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Production music by Mike Hallenbeck

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