It is an absolutely gorgeous day outside here. Windows open, fresh air blowing, and the puppy is at doggy day care so she can’t walk up to me while I’m working and smack me in the face with her paw. “Play with me, mothafukah!”
So I’m doing music stuff, which looks like this:
All those little horizontal colored bars are notes, in whatever tracks I have selected. After the notes are written, I apply a musical instrument to them, then “bounce” them, which basically inputs the MIDI data (the notes, how hard they’re played, reverb, stuff like that) into the patch, and spits out whatever music results. The music patches are huge – gigabytes in size for the larger ones – and so I can’t really leave them all loaded in memory while I’m tweaking. This results in loading a patch, messing around with the notes, bouncing it, then doing the same thing to several other tracks in sequence. The strings patches are the biggest by far, followed by the horns and trumpets, with the woodwinds and trombone and tuba patches being fairly lightweight.
Anyway, the reason why I’m doing all this work is because I submitted my song for critique, and hoo boy, did I get critiqued. Steven O’Brien, internet cool dude and fellow digital music composer (mostly classical, which seems to be a bit of a rarity) left a boatload of comments on my track that I uploaded to SoundCloud, with very helpful comments that I really needed to hear, but which left me with a lot of work to do. So I’m trying to significantly clean up the orchestration for the song while changing a few little things here and there, and trying to make it sound as realistic and “good” as possible.
Slow going, but relaxing work. ::sips tea::
I’m starting to become more aware of the limitations of my patch libraries. Hollywood Strings is a wonderful instrument, but it has some programming issues – the ones I notice the most are notes being suddenly louder when changing bow direction, and several of the patches on Hollywood Brass have some really awful clicks / pops / glitches in the solo instruments, which is very annoying. (I know it’s not my computer, because I can load a comparable patch of the same instrument and it goes away.) I’m looking seriously at Sample Modeling’s Brass collection as a way to smooth over the problems that Hollywood Brass has, so we’ll see if I can justify spending almost $600 on myself for software.
Chances are I probably can. I just have to think about the sweet, sweet sounds I’ll be able to make with teh new software. Sweet succulent sounds will flow forth from my cheap-ass MIDI keyboard and Korg nanaKONTROL 2! Women will swoon, babies will spontaneously giggle and the world will be at peace.
Or something like that.
String libraries, on the other hand, are a completely different story. They are ridiculously expensive, and for good reason, but that means I can’t just drop cash on them whenever the whim strikes me – and frankly, I haven’t found another affordable one that’s as close to Hollywood Strings in the legato + bow change articulations realism-wise, even with the programming issues. (The one O’Brien recommends – L.A. Scoring Strings – sounds great, but it’s a whopping $1,400.)
Yeah. That one might wait for a bit while I research other options.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks