It’s August 4, 2025 and I’ve just spent a day or so hammering into the latest Composing Challenge by The Crow Hill Company. This time around the challenge involved using their latest addition to the Vaults series, “Bridge Guitar“, and any old pizzicato strings to build a day-time reality queue.

While I first interpreted the prompt as a carnival-eque reality show track that you might hear as Heidi N Closet and Kahanna Montrese go at it, I decided to listen closer and found myself connecting with the musical approach on a new level.

Whether you feel reality TV refers to “Breaking Bad” or “Rupaul’s Drag Race”, the music that embellishes these worlds has more in common than you might expect. It’s drama at its fullest; jumpy and full of unbridled emotion. Much like cartoons, we humans love melodrama. In fact, this track was drawn straight from the first minute of music in one of my favourite Canadian Kids TV shows, “Jacob Two-Two”, specifically this episode.

Above all else, I appreciated this challenge in its ability to push my perception of what fuels a scene even further. I ended up using Crow Hill’s “Bridge Guitar” and “Pocket Strings” on the ‘Pluck’ setting coupled with a bit of sampling via both tools. The result, as I described it to my partner, is “a moment between two gaudy reality stars fighting over the theft of their expensive cream cheese spread a la Celebrity Surreal Life”.

As usual, the competition for this challenge is stiff and I’m just pleased to be in such good company at the end of the day, I’ve included links below to a handful of submissions by other composers in the Crow Hill community. I think my favourite is Ed Harper’s “Semi-detached”; Ed’s music is nothing short of breathtaking:

· Le Petit Pont – Matt Latulippe
· Rachel Howie
· Something’s cooking – Michael J Kiss
· Was it only a dream? – Jonathan Mele
· Semi-detached – Ed Harper
· Oh, Pizzicato – Javaperro
· Robot Detective – BS Reactor
· A Tumble – Vishen Garikedu
· Paul Wright
· Pizz Feet Under- Лев Агаджанов