Night Crawlers

[Sherry C]

Hi Ralph,

As always you never cease to amaze me. To pick out this entire score by ear like you have is pretty astounding!

I'm saving this for my practice time, comments about bass lines and drums being dull to listen to notwithstanding

I made a couple of changes to the file that I downloaded to make it more Notation Software Synth friendly. I'm thinking you probably composed this while using your Clavinova and all it's awesome sounds

1. After opening the file, I opened Staff/Setup
2. Clicked the Device header, and in the dialog box that came up, I selected "Notation Software Synth" as the device, and "General MIDI" as the MIDI bank. This just makes sure that all instruments will play on the default internal synth for most users.
3. I then noticed that I could not hear the drums, and saw that "Drums" volume in the Staff/Setup was set to 1. Since the "Drums" and "Drums (Work)" staves both share the same channel, the volume setting of "1" was affecting both staves. I know you mentioned that you use the "Drums (Work)" for the actual sound and the "Drums" staff for the printout. There are a few different ways that this situation could be handled.
   • Copy the volume Graph from the "Drums (Work)" staff on to the "Drums" staff, but set all the velocities of the "Drums" staff to 1, which you'd already done. (The volume settings affect anything on a given channel; the note velocities affect individual notes.) I did this and it sounded great to me
   • Change the channel for the "Drums" staff to an unused channel, although it looks like for this piece you've used up all 16 channels for a single device If you do change the channel number, you'll just have to be sure that the noteheads are set for percussionists
   • Change the assigned device for the "Drums" staff to a different device, and keep that device off during playback.

Cool file, and well done. Thanks for sharing this with us


ttfn,
Sherry

[rrayner]

Thank you, Sherry. I have incorporated all of your suggestions and have reposted the score.

The Clavinova was not involved. This was all done using your native Notation Composer on a Windows 7 PC. When I am making the final "sound" touches, I will connect to my Clavinova to try to improve the sound levels, etc.

This type of exercise is very beneficial. At Berklee, this was one of the Arranging Class requirements -- take a big band track you liked and copy as much of it as you can. This one was a lot easier than big band, as I only had the six horns to deal with. When there are four trumpets, five saxes and four trombones playing in ensemble, it is really "best guess" as to what the voicings might be. You try to capture the chord sound associated with each note, and that can really be a bear. A lot of that depends on how the players are set up in the recording studio. Fortunately, this piece was quite linear with a lot of doublings -- not as hard to pick out as the voiced passages. Although I really enjoyed trying to figure out the voicings of the ensemble play in the bridge at Rehearsal Mark E17, with the lead staying at one pitch and the voices underneath the lead moving throughout the chord structure. For this part, I simply voiced the top four horns in four-way voicings with the trombone and bari doubling the first two voices down an octave.

Ralph Rayner