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Valentine’s Day was last week, and it was a great day. I was able to spend it with my family and classmates from the Music Composition for the Screen MFA program. Here’s how the day went:

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Breakfast was amazing. I think that heart-shaped pancakes actually taste different than the typical round ones. And with strawberries and whip cream, you hardly need any syrup. It was a delicious start to the day.

Valentine’s Day came on a Thursday, and Thursdays are especially awesome for us because it is the start of our weekend. I’ve mentioned it before, but we get an awesome 4 day weekend—every weekend. Classes are Tuesday through Thursday, so we finish off our week with Orchestration and Lab.

Orchestration was great this week. One of our assignments was to completely recreate a piece of Gary‘s choosing. We re-did the first three minutes of a piece from Drive by Cliff Martinez. Gary knows Cliff and shared with us that the piece was written entirely on Ableton Live. Cliff has a unique French Crystal Baschet. It has an amazing sound, like a digital pad, which we tried to recreate. Gary also went through compressors with us (really in-depth). He knows so much off the top of his head. It’s amazing. Gary was one of the pioneers of digital music, and we learn so much from him.

We have an hour between Orchestration and Lab, so we went to lunch. We usually head out to restaurants in the area all together. That day we went to Jimmy John’s, and I snapped this great picture of Alexis.

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For lab, we are re-scoring a scene from Brave. Animation is not easy to tackle, but Rich has so much knowledge, and it’s a great assignment.

I came home with flowers and the whole bit. We had steak and potatoes for dinner and chocolate covered strawberries for dessert. And of course, Olivia made a cute Valentine’s Day card for me, too. She’s coming up on 9 months, and it’s so fun.

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How was your Valentine’s Day? What did you do? Leave a comment below!