Monalia Ventress is a composer / sound designer and co-founder of Partners In Rhyme, Inc., she is also an author and has her first novel, Horizontal Rain: Memoirs from Middle Earth, available for purchase on Amazon.com.

It tells the story of our travels through New Zealand, Indochina, Indonesia, Australia and more along with detailed and exclusive ‘making of’ stories about The Lord of the Rings films which I worked on while we were living in New Zealand.

Here is the jacket blurb from the book:

Mona-Lia and Mark are two ex-scenesters living in Hollywood who uproot their recording studio, two dogs and burgeoning Internet company and move to New Zealand where Mark has landed a visual effects job working on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Both of their lives change completely for better and worse. Mark begins working inhuman hours and is swallowed whole by his new job while Mona-Lia travels around the Southern Hemisphere to escape the domestic stress and strain his new job causes. Mona-Lia and Mark rediscover themselves and each other in their quest to explore new and exotic lands such as Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Tokyo, Samoa, Fiji and Bali. This three year journey is filled with detailed accounts of the making of the visual effects of The Lord of the Rings films along with in depth observations on what it is they learned about leaving their home, friends and family in California to live and work in a new country.

If you’re interested at all in how Partners In Rhyme Inc came about and grew into what is today then check out Horizontal Rain: Memoirs from Middle Earth.

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With increased competition in the royalty free music marketplace there are lots of sites popping up that are selling music for ridiculously low fees. They are asking composers to upload their tracks promising them only 40% or 45% of a $10.00 fee. The composer would take home whopping $4.50 for a high quality full length track.
$4.50 will barely get you a gallon of gas.
These sites do not offer any backend royalties either.

I urge all royalty free music composers to avoid these types of sites or at least give some serious thought to what you are doing before you upload. These sites will only devalue your catalog and make it hard for other distribution channels to accept your music. If your track is on sale for $10.00 on eCheapMusic.com then it will make it very difficult for a proper site to justify charging a higher price for your music elsewhere.

Just my 2 cents but I know that many other royalty free music site owners agree with me on this one.

You can now download high quality royalty free classical music to use in your commercial project for a low, one-time fee at:
Royalty Free Classical Music

These royalty music clips were performed by a real symphony orchestra playing the most popular favorites from these famous composers:
Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Dukas, Dvorak, Elgar, Grieg, Handel, Haydn, Liszt, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Mussorgsky, Offenbach, Pachelbel, Paganini, Parry, Ponchielli, Puccini, Purcell, Respighi, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rossini, Satie, Schubert, Schumann, Smetana, Sousa, Strauss, Suppe, Tchaikovsky, Traditional, Verdi, Vivaldi, Von Weber, Wagner

Some royalty free music websites will charge you up to $370.00 to use this music in your broadcast TV show or film. Royalty Free Classical Music only charges $34.95.

Partners In Rhyme is a US corporation but we are based in Barcelona, Spain. We are currently visiting family and friends and taking care of misc business in California. We are fortunate to be staying at a nice bungalow right on the beach at the end of Topanga Canyon Rd.
We have been catching up with some of our LA based composers while staying here.
Our first visitor was Bob Mann who I have known for almost 30 years now. He is the composer for our Auraspheres ambient music collection and a contributor to musicloops.com.

Mark and Bob

Tonight we met Gayle Ellett and his wife who had just flown in from New Zealand. We had a wonderful chat with them over a bottle of wine. Gayle has been part of Partners In Rhyme for a very long time now and has been a steady contributor. His latest collections are Exotic Acoustic and Dreamscapes.

Mark and Gayle

Paul Black is a friend of mine since the early punk days back in Hollywood. We have been in a few bands together and have always made great music together.
Paul was a founding member and lead singer of LA Guns who are now on a comeback trail with a new record deal and worldwide tours.
It was great to catch up with Paul again after more than 10 years. We sang songs for each other and talked about old times and old friends. Paul is also a film composer and might be contributing to the Partners In Rhyme catalog in the future.

Paul Black and Mark

Christopher Mast is posting some nice music available for YouTube videos and videoblogs under the Creative Commons 3.0 apportioned attribution.

Check out his page here and download his royalty free music clips in WAV format
Download Clips from Christopher Mast.