Orig tunes + score

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I'll try to take listen, but you might get more responses posting here:

http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=12

That's where people will be looking for such stuff. We tend to chat more about the craft of composing-arranging in this section. Once I listen, I may take this thread into that area - but again, your wider audience will be in the showcase section.

[Frodo]

Hey Linwood:

Very nice piece!

There are a few things you could do-- I'll try to be brief-- ( )

1. Make friends with the conductor track! There are lots of expressive ways to handle the time with some of the melodic lines. For example, the very first B-natural in the bassoon could "last longer"-- in fact, the first three eighth-notes in the bassoon could drag a little and the next four eighth-notes could speed up imperceptibly to lead into measure 2. Less might be done at measure 2, but a less rigid beat flow would add much to the expressiveness of those lines.

Exploiting a wider dynamic range with such lines can also help, especially with softer notes. You want to avoid extremes, but you also want to keep the parts as interesting and dynamically expressive as you play with the tempos.

Before doing a crescendo, bring the dynamics down a little. This pulls the ear into the mix, so to speak, and then the same crescendo will be more effective.

Try not to always have every instrument crescendoing and decrescendoing at the same time the same way. The more variation you have throughout, the more depth you can create.

Also-- on page 5, second measure in, you have a crescendo leading to a real "pay-off" high point in the third measure on that page when the violins carry the melody. Try ramping down the tempo a little on the second half of the crescendo measure so that you have a "fat" down beat on the next bar before the violins start. At that point you can ramp the tempo back up to where it feels comfortable.

Now, by ramping tempos up and down, we're talking about a tick or two at a time. It should feel organic and natural and not so much like the tempos are all over the place. The fluctuations in tempo should serve the expressive intent of the music.

2. Check out some of John Williams' tracks-- "Princess Leia's Theme" from Episode 4 is a great example of how naturally this kind of piece can ebb and flow. What I've done just as an exercise is to put tracks like this into DP and use Adjust Beats just to get a sense of how much the tempo can be flexible and un-rigid. From there, you can go back to your "Answers" track and toy with the conductor track to really inject some "soul" into the flow of it.

3. A lot of times, whole notes do the trick of padding out large amounts of measures, but nothing is more stagnant than a whole note. There's nothing wrong with stagnant music IF and only IF that's the effect you want.

Measure 8 (second measure on page 3)-- look at the French horns and trombone. One technique for this sort of thing is not to use half notes, but try breaking up the rhythm into eighth-quarter-eighth, eighth-quarter-eighth (repeated notes played legato). This adds some life and greater carriage to the accompaniment which can then be massaged and shaped with CC11.

Similarly, Measure 16 on page 5, the cellos and basses are playing whole notes. Try this as an experiment--- use the "eighth-quarter-eighth, eighth-quarter-eighth" trick in the contrabass part, and try this for the cello:

Top line cello-- all eight-notes: F#-A-A-F#, F#-A-A-F# (up a minor third)
Bottom line-- all eighth-notes: A-D-D-A, A-D-D-A (up a perfect fourth)

Again, this offers you an accompanying figure that has a little more carriage and texture. You can do much more with CC11 here as well.

Please forgive these terms, but when an orchestra plays at a louder dynamic level on a piece like yours, it doesn't just play loud and stay there. It actually "throbs" and "sobs". The eighth-note trick with CC11 really goes far with the throbbing and sobbing. (That really didn't sound right...)

Other techniques are possible-- such as using a tremolo on these same parts. It's just a matter of trying all sorts of different things that add interest and support without getting in the way.

There are a number of scores you could look at, particularly those of Ravel and Debussy, to study other ways they keep accompanying parts interesting-- and which also show a masterful understanding of what each instrument can do. Orchestration is one thing, but making the most of each instrument is a whole lesson by itself.

To that extent-- try doing more with string vibrato-- and by more, I also mean "less". Some notes will be played non-vibrato. Some notes will have full vibrato. Some notes will start non-vibrato and add it gradually. All notes will have different amounts of vibrato when vibrato is used. EWQLSO's mod wheel patches are great for this, and when used in conjunction with CC11 dynamics, you'll suddenly start hearing things come to life.

Take the violin's first note, the F# at measure 16. You could start that particular note softer an interpolate a crescendo and vibrato increase on just that one note. It would make a world of difference.

Warning: it's time consuming, but it's a load of fun.

[Frodo]

Dude-- I'm still struggling, even for as long as I've been doing it.

One exercise I'm working on now is a short snippet from the first Harry Potter film. (It's not that I have a John WIlliams addiction--).

Don't know how familiar you are with it, but I was really bugged by the "machine gun" effect when playing fast violin lines. I wanted to work on ways with both VSL and EWQLSO to get the violins to play lots of fast notes on one bow and then to program the bow changes for a continuing run of fast notes. This particular excerpt from Harry Potter is one of the most difficult string passages of its kind and seemed a fitting challenge.

Well, having started this earlier this week, I've spent an average of 2 hours a day just working with the first violins. On the surface, it seemed that I could make a single legato patch work. But I ended up using about 7 different violin samples and about 50 keyswitches for about a minute of music!! It's coming along, but MAN. It's a lot of work-- a lot of trial and error-- and a lot more error than trial.

As for playing things in real time, that's not always possible for a lot of people. When a score is already done in Sibelius or Finale, here's one trick you could try:

1. Go through the printed score and highlight the important lines. For "Answers" it might be the bassoon part on page 1, then a violin part next.... Pick out some single line for the whole score.

2. Next, turn off the metronome and deactivate the conductor track.

3. Even if you have to play a little bit at a time, practice playing a phrase as expressively as possible, then play it in using a piano sample as a starter. Punch in until you've gone through the whole piece so that it sounds very expressive.

4. Freeze that track and import it into your orchestral template as audio.

5. Solo the track, if necessary, but use the Adjust Beats feature to align DP's barlines with your expressive guide track. Line up all the downbeats first and don't worry about the rest right away. Go back and then line up all the third beats. If necessary, go back again and line up all the second and fourth beats, but you might not have to do this for every measure.

When using Adjust Beats, DP automatically makes a tempo map in the conductor track which can be fine-tuned as you work on getting your various orchestral instruments to sound more expressive.

Now, you have a MIDI file in DP that *should* begin to feel less rigid. Just keep fine-tuning until your phrases start to feel really good.

There is never an end to the learning process, so don't feel discouraged.

It's good to look at the scores of other composers to see how they handle the same sorts of interpretive issues you're working on. Fortunately, there is the International Music Score Library Project that has lots of public domain scores in PDF format-- free downloads, no sign ups... Here's a link to Ravel's "La Valse":

http://imslp.org/wiki/La_Valse_%28Ravel%2C_Maurice%29

[bralston]

linwood,

First of all, thank you for sharing. The piece is good, but instead of commenting on the creative aspects of your composition, I am just going to address your comment about wanting to get better at making the mock-up. And I hear you about your current computer specs. Just know that I am discussing a set-up that you will probably have to gradually move toward.

Basically...as you may have feared and speculated...in order to have a more realistic mockup, you are going to need to NOT import the piece from Sibelius. You are going to have to perform the piece in one track at a time. Or even...compose right in the sequencer first.

Believe me...I am classically trained. I am comfortable writing with pencil and paper. BUT, in the virtual instrument world, the performance of the notes is very different than a live musician reading the notes on a page. Importing the MIDI file makes it too perfect. There is little to no creative interpretation. And you have already commented on your mockup being stiff. This is a big reason why. It is that imperfection from part to part that makes the live orchestra feel...well...alive and human. So...within the confines of your current computer, I would seriously try to find a way where you can play in each part yourself. On difficult lines, temporarily shift tempos slower while performing the parts in if need be, then change them back up to the real tempo. Maybe on fast runs, you can copy and paste some notes in, since those are harder to perform without piano chops. But for the most part, get use to playing the various instruments in your sampled orchestra, and then record them in as live players would perform each part. On a slower computer, you will not be able to have the entire orchestra play all the MIDI instruments at once. You would have to bounce those MIDI tracks to audio in sections. On a top of the line 8-Core Mac Pro with LOTS of RAM...you would be fine.

Also...down the road you might want to look into convolution reverbs for the mixing side of things. One to seriously consider would be Altiverb. (http://www.audioease.com) These are expensive as well as taxing on the CPU of the computer. So a powerful computer would be necessary. They can also take years to master the use of them. But, they will ultimately give you the ability to send your audio tracks to these reverbs with various early reflections and depths to create depth in your orchestra recordings. And since the reverbs in the program and taken from acoustically sampling various concert halls and scoring stages around the world, you can place your MIDI orchestra recordings in those places fairly easily.

So..along with the good tips that Frodo and MIDI Life Crisis have given you...I would highly recommend that you find a way to get comfortable with treating your compositional process in stages. 1st is your creation of the creative work...perhaps that is still in Sibelius...or maybe you will find a way to start in the sequencer and then transition into Sibelius from there.

And 2nd is the creation of the mock-up which may be quicker and more realistic to just play the parts in separately from your Sibelius score. If I write in Sibelius, I usually find the amount of time I spend tweaking an imported MIDI file to get it to sound "real" and human is more than the time it would have taken me to just play the darn thing in part by part and be done with it. For my film work...I also have gotten to the point where I can just write in the sequencer now, thus making the mockup at the same time as the creation of the composition. Then if parts are required for live musicians...I can usually quantize and export a MIDI file from the sequencer and go into Sibelius from there almost quicker than doing it the other way around. Sometimes I just re-enter the parts though too. It depends on the condition of the MIDI tracks in the sequencer.

Sometimes...the way I would do something for a realistic mock-up is very different than how I would notate something for a live musician. They are different animals and should be treated as such.

For example...one good way to create a realistic run is to layer in a second MIDI track of the run notes playing a trill patch. The legato note runs layered with the trill samples playing the same run create a smoother, realistic run to the ear. But that is a MIDI trick to get the samples to not be so stiff and has no basis in reality on how the part should look on the page for a musician.

[Frodo]

Sometimes...the way I would do something for a realistic mock-up is very different than how I would notate something for a live musician. They are different animals and should be treated as such.

Oh, man. You just rang my doorbell with that statement.

Whenever I'm preparing scores for Finale, I opt to work in DP for note entry (because I cannot stomach note entry in Finale unless it's a chord chart or a piano-vocal or something small). While working in DP I always quantize every note on and every note off just to facilitate Finale's MIDI import translation.

But indeed. I can not use a project with notes treated this way for a "performance" track.

It really is a nearly "backwards" workflow-- dealing with notation and dealing with a performance mock-up, isn't it? Sometimes orchestral scores can get so dense that it's easy to loose track of where you are in the score when dealing with a bit of oboe here only to jump to a bit of viola there, then back to a French horn somewhere else: the necessity to do this sometimes has more to do with the fact that certain orchestral parts dictate the interpretation more than others at any given moment. I can understand why a lot of people just want to get all the notes out of the way so that they can focus on choices of samples and other matters more closely related to the engineering aspects of the project.

So my compromise is to do a piano reduction first just to get the expressive interpretation figured out before having to deal with what patches are going to work or not work.

I wholly agree with your suggestion about using a trill sample for fast runs. That Harry Potter excerpt I'm using as an exercise right now tackles this very issue. One of the samples I'm using here is a trill sample, but I am also keyswitching frequently between an ordinary long-note sample, a performance legato with release samples, and several other long-note samples. It only takes a few notes before the ear "catches on" and the attacks of these samples start to sound too predictable, hence all the keyswitching. After I got the entire passage put it and working okay, I went back and alternated layers-- putting the trill sample underneath the performance legato, putting the performance legato underneath the regular long-note samples, etc. What adds to the effectiveness of having more than a dozen players not playing perfectly together (as in real life) was playing in the part again and avoiding copying/pasting.

And then there is the deadline aspect. There's nothing written anywhere that says that one can do all they'd like to do "by Friday at 5 pm". But finding the most frugal workflow that allows the user to get the most accomplished in the least amount of time-- without taking shortcuts that impact negatively on the end result-- will forever be my biggest challenge.

Thanks, Brian.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

.. I've never been in a room with a string section.

Just like playing tug o' war except you're all pulling in the same direction. (And the ropes are a lot smaller)

[FMiguelez]

.

Hi, Linwood.

PM sent.

[jroadrage]

There's already a lot of good advice here but one thing that I'd add is that because the string section as a whole is so homogenous in sound and the individual sections tend to have fairly even dynamics across their range, a whole string section can be much more tolerant of line crossing and wider spacing than the other orchestral sections.

If you study some of the scores from the composers mentioned in this thread, particular Ravel, you'll see a lot of instances where the Vcls play above the Vlas, Vlns I doubled with Vcls 8vb and the Vlns II and Vlas providing the background material, etc.