Simple Gifts

This started as a fairly short piece for flute, piano, soprano and tambourine. The orchestral version incorporates most of that, the words and music of Elder Jospeh Brackett, written in 1847, some new melodic material and two additional verses of "Simple Gifts", the author(s) of which I haven't been able to find out.

The piece is most often referred to as a hymn, but it has also been called a work song and a dancing song. Joseph Brackett, I suspect, would have said that a hymn is for all of life, which includes working and dancing. There is a description I read once of the Elder singing it with his coat tails flying.

<center><table border=1><tr><td>Simple Gifts
SG (190.7 k)</td></tr></table></center>

For some reason MS wavetable distorts many of the instruments. I wrote it with Composer set to SB Live synth A.

Hello M.G. and Sherry,

I'm still waiting to hear Sherry's GPO orchestration of this. How's that going?

Cheers
-- Mark

Howdy guys,

I'd emailed MG privately to apologize for taking so long with this.

He has done a tremendous amount of work with setting note velocities and such, as well as tweaking other parameters to give a very good performance in GM (general MIDI) instruments. His .not file is a tremendous example of the capabilities of a composer using Composer Unfortunately, it's too large for the forum server to accept as an upload.

As for my end of the deal, I've got the GPO Personal Studio set up, as well as MG's fabulous .not file (over 2Mb!) with the channels setup preliminarily, but I'm having some "issues" with channel assignments with the Kontakt studio, as well as some low memory issues (I have 1.5 Gb), that are causing crackling in the playback. Unfortunately, the Studio has some limitations on the ASIO buffer settings, so I'm having to mess around with which driver and which settings to use so I can get a smooth playback.

I've got all the "visual" stuff minimized when I play back (ie, Composer has a small screen, with only the buttons showing) so that the video aspect isn't sucking up memory, as well as all my usual memory saving techniques, so I'm pretty much at my limit.

Mark, since you also use GPO, and probably with larger instrument pools than I usually do, do you have any suggestions? I have to confess I haven't checked the GPO forum lately, as I've had a few other things going on, too

Actually, just sitting here typing this, a possible solution comes to mind. I'm wondering if the memory issues are related to the .not being large or if it's because of all the instruments. It's just a "full orchestra", which 1 Mb of memory is supposed to handle. I think I'll go try splitting up the .not right now and see

ttfn,
Sherry

Hi Sherry,

I'd be pleased to try rendering the GPO version of Simple Gifts on my machine. Just send me the GPO version of the .not file and its companion .gpo file.

It is unlikely to help to divide up the .not from 1Mb to smaller pieces. I should know more precisely, but a 1Mb .not file probably uses 1Mb to 2Mb of memory when loaded. Out of the total pool of 1.5Gb memory on your machine, that shouldn't be an issue. You can use tools to know whether memory is an issue. Or, listen to you hard disk to hear whether it's swapping pages of virtual memory in and out.

Cheers
-- Mark

Hi Sherry and Mark,

Wow, GPO sounds very complex...and as if something of a super computer is needed to use it as GP "Orchestra."

Sherry, I usually do as you do when I record. I even leave enough silence before the music starts to minimize everything, even the program I use to record. Since Total Recorder has an option to shut out system sounds, I don't often have problems with random noise or slowdowns unless I'm connected to my ISP, even with other programs running, for some reason. But the only safe way is with nothing but the desktop showing and even the av disabled.

I've listened to examples from the GPO site, and it sounds worth saving up for, but on a computer with 256K memory, operating at 1.2ghz (if that's the term), I don't know. So my interest extends beyond "Simple Gifts."

all best,
mgj

Hi,

Since this had to be broken up into three pieces because of the Soundclick size limits, I have uploaded it to Z-Share. It can't be streamed from there, but can be downloaded and played in whatever player you use.

The download should start if you enter:

http://www.zshare.net/audio/1432969698ac3475/

The shound quality should be a bit better than that of the Soundclick recordings.

all best,
mgj