Flaming Chords

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One of the songs I thought I had done (except for lyrics) just took a step backward -- it turns out I made a newbie mistake on it.

Recently, I finished writing out the sheet music for it in Harmony Assistant, and for the first few times, I've shown it to a few friends, including a couple of former High School band geeks -- and both of these former band geeks seem to read music as easily and casually as I can read text. (You have no idea how much I envy them for this. Have you ever seen a small child just learning to read, using his finger to lead? That's me with sheet music.)

One of them is a lady I tried to lay, once. (It never happened, but we had enough in common -- music, mostly -- that we are still good friends.) She looked at the flute line and informed me that while flutes can reach those high notes, that doesn't necessarily mean they should.

The other is the wife of my manager at work. (Both he and his wife were good friends of mine years before we worked together.) She politely assumed that I'd merely mislabeled a piccolo line, and when I told her I hadn't, she winced.

That's the biggest pitfall in working with MIDI. MIDI instruments have the range of a full keyboard, which is at least five octaves, and often more. A real-life flute has a theoretical range of about three octaves... and a practical range of about one and a half. Above this sweet spot, they can still hit the notes, but they become quite shrill. And since MIDI sounds are sample-based, if you exceed an instrument's natural range, MIDI will do its best to accommodate you. A good thing for a keyboardist. Not such a good thing for a composer.

Ah, well. It seems I have some rewriting to do.

Dammit.

I spent about two hours on trains to attend a friend's birthday party last night. Not that I'm complaining -- the party was absolutely worth it! -- but still, two hours is a long time for me to be trying to sit still and not annoy the fuck out of my fellow passengers by bouncing in my seat and using every surface I can reach as a drum pad.

Good thing I had blank staff paper with me; in those two hours, I got about two minutes of music written. I know that this doesn't sound like much, but considering that I'm writing for orchestra plus guitars, and using an average of eight to ten staves at any given time, two minutes in two hours is actually a pretty decent clip. It's in C minor, which isn't all that unusual for me. It's also in 4/4, which is unusual for me, and the tempo is about ♩=60, which is very much unlike me. (I tend to like ♩=160 better, and I'll occasionally go as high as ♩=210.)

Still, I think I'm proud of it, and I should have it fed into my computer in a day or two. I'm still struggling a little with writing actual notes on staves -- when I used Cakewalk, I tended to use the graphpaper view a lot -- so it should be interesting to see how much editing I'll have to do once I hear it.


As I said, the party was absolutely worth the trip. The theme was Childhood regression, so along with the Muppets, I saw episodes of Schoolhouse Rock, which I haven't seen since I was about eight. The song "Dem Not-So-Dry Bones" reminded me a lot of Count Von Count's song, "Bones Inside of You." During "The Tale of Mr. Morton," I cracked a joke about wanting to write a song on Latin declension. During "Interplanet Janet," we discussed the inclusion of Pluto on the list, and about that one Animaniacs episode in which Wacko says "you forgot Uranus!" During "Little Twelve Toes," we discussed counting on your fingers, and both binary and chisanbop were mentioned immediately. And during the episodes explaining United States History and Government, we all made comments about just how... ahem, sanitary... their versions were.

(Did I mention we're all geeks?)

I just finished an interlude to a song I'm working on. Four of the verses include three separate vocal lines, overlapping to various degrees, complete with harmonies. Four more verses include a ridiculous number of syllables in a rather tight space: Stephen bloody Sondheim would look at what I've done, and either fall in love with me, or decide right then and there that I'm absolutely nuts.

And to top it off, I didn't do this in 4/4 or 2/2 or waltz time or something easy, oh no-no-no-no-no! The music under all of these verses is in 11/4! And even better yet, it sounds natural in 11/4 -- a lot of music in odd meters tends to sound like showing off. (This same song's intro is in 13/8, for instance, and the whole point of using 13/8 in that section is to confuse the hell out of people.)

I am very much pleased!

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, trust me, I just pulled off something very difficult. It'll be a while before I can offer it up for beta, because the vocal lines require more range and agility than I possess, and because the timing is so wonky that it would be pointless to offer lyrics all by themselves.

I just downloaded the trial version of Synful, a program that simpulates orchestral instruments for certain composition programs. The good news is, its instrument simulations are nothing short of amazing.

Unfortunately, it's resource-intensive as hell: if I try to record more than two tracks at once, it pops, skips, and eventually drops out. In Cakewalk, there's a meter that tells you how much CPU the program is using at any given time. Up until now, I've never had to pay any attention at all to it. Now, it redlines whenever I try to play even three tracks, and then it starts skipping. I'll probably redo one of my songs with it in the next few days, just because the sound is so amazingly good, but considering that the string section alone will require three separate takes, it will be a long and tedious process.

Fortunately, I don't need it for all instruments. Standard midi does some instruments beautifully; I can leave the drums, piano, harp, dulcimer, pizzicato strings, and a few other instruments alone. And obviously, a program that's intended for orchestration isn't going to have patches for extra-crunchy guitars, so I won't be using Synful for that -- I'll still need to work on my guitar chops to record the thrashy bits.

That still leaves the entire brass section (five or six tracks), the entire woodwind section (six to eight tracks), and nearly all of the strings (five tracks). At least I can compose in standard midi, which will let me use up to sixteen tracks at once, and then convert to Synful's library for mixdown. This will keep composing from being absolute agony, but a certain amount of grief seems to be unavoidable.

Part of the problem may be other software. I've generally been lax about keeping my computer running efficiently, because it hasn't come up. Now, I have to figure a few things out. What other programs might be hogging resources? How many other processes can I safely turn off? Do I need more memory? Do I need (gasp) a new motherboard?

I have fifteen days to figure all this shit out. Beyond that, I'll need to fork over about $500 if I decide to keep the program. It ain't cheap, but it compares very favorably against hiring an orchestra, and it does sound damned good. My quirky mix of Classical Music and Progressive Metal is now at least two steps closer to seeing the light of day. W00t!