[herbert]

Hi Ralph,

My comments on your arrangements were about the .mp3 file. Playing the song over Composer, using the MS wave table on my computer, sounds awful. However I did look at the notation with interest.

All of music production is very time consuming. It took Richard Wagner 26 years to create the Ring. This included, designing new instruments and convincing wealthy royalty to built for him a most audacious venue, just to perform his works, as well as chasing after all the wives of his friends and even writing music for them. Wagner was a great innovator. Midi is today’s great innovation, completely revolutionising music production. Midi connects notation with the actual acoustic experience we want to obtain.

The language of midi is much more the language of engineers, technicians and computer programmers, not the language of musicians.

Velocity is a measure of how harsh or soft a note sounds. If you hit a keyboard key with great fury, at a high velocity, you will get a harsh sound. If you hit a keyboard key gently, that is slowly or at a low velocity, the sound will be mellow. Balancing Velocity and Channel Volume, gives you the ability to set the character of a note. For instance for an aggressive Trombone you would select a high Velocity, while adjusting the Channel Volume, to blend the sound level with the other instruments. Alongside with the name Velocity, Composer uses incorectly the name Loudness. This could be confusing. Loudness does not exist in the language of music, nor does it exist in the language of midi. Loudness relates to the human hearing physiology. See for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness

For a mellow sustained sound of plugged instrument such as an acoustic bass or an acoustic nylon stringed guitar, I use a low velocity value at a higher channel volume as you have done for the bass.

If you are only concerned about producing good notation, there is no need to spend much time on midi editing. There would however be a very considerable time involved in midi editing if you were producing the music track for instance for a Hollywood motion picture. In each case there will be a compromise of time spent against returns. I certainly have to limit the time I spend, for getting a necessary result. To obtain natural sounding results, the essential midi editing tasks are:

1. All notated expressions.
2. Spread out the point of time of attack of percussive and plucked instruments.
3. Set velocity and channel volume.
4. Set vibrato if used.
5. Set pan if used.

Various sample libraries provide the ability of programming special articulation such as shakes, kisses, doits and falloffs for brass, etcetera. Removing the “machine gun effect” is quite important too. Unfortunately, the list of CCs in Notation Composer is not complete.

Again it is all a compromise, in getting desired results for time spent, as you also indicate.


Herbert