This was a lazy day: all I did was replay about half the sound files for William Blake’s Inn, apply reverb in SndSampler, and upload the corresponding mp3s to the William Blake page.

I also made myself a new CD for the van.

Well, if I’m bored enough this afternoon, I may actually attempt a little more orchestration of Milky Way‘s recapitulation.

I girded my loins and returned to Milky Way. I worked all night on smoothing out the lumps in mm. 61-75. It’s better, but I still have some polishing to do. The subito p at m.64 still sounds gulpy, but that might not be an issue with an actual orchestra.

There are other places where there are gaps in the sound, but I don’t know whether I want to add the missing instruments for those measures. Tutti can be boring.

I’ll keep listening and make some decisions.

And now you can listen too: turning off the reverb makes the thing bearable for my little laptop. It won’t sound as lush, of course, but all the notes are there. Here’s the mp3.

I went back to work on Milky Way tonight. ::sigh::

I worked on the child’s exultant cry that he’ll “never part day from night!” and the recapitulation moment. ::sigh:: I used the SoftSynth instruments so that the computer wouldn’t bog down with hiccups and glitches, and it was sounding good in a sketched-out kind of way.

Then I switched over to the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds. ::sigh:: Now it sounds like crap, all unbalanced and blaring.

One positive thing: I found that by turning off the “ambience” setting, i.e., reverb, there are a lot fewer hiccups.

It still sounds like crap. ::sigh::

So today I went to the Apple Store at Lenox Mall. My plan was simple: find a MacBook Pro with at least 2GB of RAM, pop the Milky Way Finale file onto it, and then see if Finale could play it. I even made an appointment at the Genius Bar so that I wouldn’t have to flag down a passing teenager with a black t-shirt on.

Well, Genius is as genius does, and we all know about simple plans.

They didn’t have Finale loaded on any of the machines, and in fact they don’t sell it in the store at all. (They do sell one of MakeMusic’s entry level programs.) The Genius turned me over to a salesperson, who suggested that he see if they had a refurbished MacBook Pro that met my specifications, and then I could buy it and take it home to see if it worked.

If it didn’t work (and even if it did), I could return it, and since it was a refurbished model there would be no restocking fee.

Wouldn’t you know it, there was no such machine in the back room. So I was spared the indignity of having to buy a $3000 used machine to take home and try out.

The rest of the day I spent with Jobie doing the usual: shopping, seeing a movie, grabbing a burger at a gay sports bar. This was the first time I was ever in a gay bar where I felt out of place, so to speak: twenty televisions, all tuned to some football game, and a bar full of jocks screaming at them. The fact that some of the jocks were kissing each other wasn’t the problem.

We will now pause while Marc makes some egregious comment connecting the above paragraph and the title of this post.

Anyway, when I returned home, I went to Finale’s website and posted my problem on the user forum, which is what I should have done in the first place.

As is often the case when I’m stuck, I retreat to the printed word.

After my recent frustration with my attempts to orchestrate the central passage (mm. 62-71) of Milky Way, I decided to do some academic homework. I pulled out The Study of Orchestration, Samuel Adler, second edition, and actually read some of the sections on orchestrating different sections of the orchestra.

While it’s not as funny as Norman Del Mar’s Anatomy of the Orchestra, let’s face it, few books are, the Adler is nonetheless well written and useful. I sat beside my fire in the living room and read the chapters on woodwinds and brass as deployed in a full orchestra, and I began to think through these measures.

Continue reading “Progress, of a kind (Day 102/365)” →

I went back and reworked the measures I had blocked in last night. They’re getting there, although I still can’t hear exactly what they should sound like because of the computer. I tried switching over to the SoftSynth sounds, since they don’t have the memory issues, but they sounded very strident.

I’m now into the first part of that climactic portion that gave me so much trouble nearly 60 days ago. It’s got to sound exactly right, and I have a feeling I’m going to have to work with it a lot… and with a computer that doesn’t have the power to give me what I need. Feh.

Even though I didn’t have full time at the computer tonight owing to a social event, I have orchestrated more or less halfway through Milky Way. And this time I have an mp3 to prove it.

Lots and lots of tempo glitches in this one, since the orchestral sound is really too large for my laptop to calculate on the fly. Whenever there’s a dropout in the playback, it shows up as a hiccup in the recording.

Still, it sounds nice. I’m sure it will evolve further.

By the way, is anyone writing their novel this month?

My luck holds with Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way. Tonight I got another 18 measures orchestrated, and although I think I still have some polishing to do, what I have is still fine. (I’m not ready to post it as an mp3, however.)

One thing I’m learning is to hold back my resources. I remember reading (in several places) that Schumann would never trust his winds to hold the line on their own and consequently muddied his textures unnecessarily by doubling them with the strings. I’m afraid I suffer from his fears. But as I listen to symphonic music these days, I pay particular attention to those times when the woodwinds especially are holding down the fort all on their own, and I try to force myself to use them as they were meant to be used.

I think I’ve been successful in that passage which follows the line “and I fear we will finish it old,” m. 31-34. I’ve sprinkled that melodic line all the way down the woodwinds section before picking back up with the strings at the end. It sounds like real music.

In fact, this represents progress on a problem that has been facing me since I finished Milky Way: how to orchestrate the nearly constant sixteenth note passages that drive most of the piece. I knew I would have to find ways to vary who’s playing them, or it would be insanely boring if not outright grating. Up to this passage, it’s just been the celli, which is fine, since it establishes the themes. But from here on out it’s got to be shared amongst the rest of the orchestra.