Hi Mark,
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How much work did you do on the composition before you recording the "map" on your keyboard? Did you sketch the notes on paper as crib notes for recording? Or, did you work with the composition for a fairly long time so that it was in your fingers? Or, did you use a MIDI sequencer to record lots of short portions of the composition as it evolved into a completed composition.
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I've put a general "how I use MidiNotate" in the thread at http://www.notation.com/cgi-bin/disc...=6403#POST6403

Specifics of "Bobsprit's Hornpipe" itself: there were stage directions of sorts and two important lyric lines "We float around Long Island Sound/But not too far from shore". Those lyrics set the tempo and whole verse structure: the "pom-pom-pom-pom" stay-on-the-same-chord style from HMS Pinafore (and the Modern Major-General's song, which was also in mind) just begged to be used. So I sat at the piano going "pom-pom-pom-pom" and fiddling with the right hand, occasionally recording a chunk on elcheapo tape recorder.

I don't remember how long it took to get the basics, but there's a solid hour of actual tryout-tape in archives, so perhaps 16-20 hours of actual piano spread over three weeks or so? Plus listening to tape late at night and thinking about it. Plus lyrics getting written in the process and themselves starting to alter the music. But no scoring as such got done until there was a good prototype not only "in my fingers" but also on tape, and then the scoring was melody fragments and chord sequences with proto-lyrics.

The prototype was played in real time at the MIDI keyboard, with the taperecording playing loudly into one ear and the synthesiser input looping back into the other. With many stops and starts. Short bursts (phrase at a time) were absolutely necessary because the non-click-track plain audio tape and the midi metronome will never quite match, no matter how carefully one tries, and too long a playing burst ends up way out of strict time. I would love to be able to input in varying time, say "I know the tempo goes up and down, but these are the beats, here is where the barline should be, now clean it up". Perhaps next year...

When I'm on a roll inputting I'll keep going, even where I totally mangle a bar. Then I'll erase that bar's contents, and "punch in" a replacement recording. That's when the "in my fingers" comes into play most, I think.

The resulting apparent MIDI shambles was edited into better shape, and then layering of instruments started, those carrying the "voices" first. In the meantime, lyrics had evolved and resulted in large chunks being cut out of the original MIDI file, and one new large chunk added.

The choice of instruments was determined by my Yamaha PSR310, which had lovely strings but severe limitations in almost all other directions. eg in the whole opera as it stands at present, there's not a line of clarinet or flute, for the simple reason both sound appalling...and the trombone originally doubled for trumpet and so on. OTOH, it led to a very individual, indeed idiosyncratic sound.

Some further cleaning up of the midi-file, and relabelling, was needed to move to General Midi.

The vocal score accompaniment was a combination of all the instrumental parts and the map, bravely edited back to a sparse piano, then checked and modified by playing at the piano.

Sounds more complex than it seemed at the time...what I really need now are singers. Singers!

Regards
Tim

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