There’s no way I’ll make the deadline with a finished piece so I took a chance and bounced down what I have so I could submit. My wife’s Prius died and I had to pick her up from the dealer this morning among other things, like a previous commitment to go look at furniture for our living room yesterday afternoon. Life keeps going on, it doesn’t stop for little orchestra pieces!!

I’m up to bar 50 but the piece is still kind of like a checkerboard. I’ll work ahead with a section and then fill in behind it. I haven’t written the intro yet, the music currently starts at bar 18. I’ll probably leave at least one blank bar at the beginning for controller setups, initial keyswitches, etc.

Well, below is a sketch I am going to start to put in to the computer, hopefully to meet a deadline on Friday, which is very ambitious. It’s a TAXI listing, not a gig deadline, so if I miss it, it’s not the end of the world. But I’d like to challenge myself to come up with a big orchestral piece and have it be big and powerful yet not over complex orchestrationally.

So, briefly, here’s what I’ve done so far:

I set up a form and a harmonic structure and played it in to the sequencer roughly using a piano patch.

Then I printed out some sketch paper with the piano part on the top and 4 staves below.

I already knew that I was going to use strings, brass, percussion, woodwinds and voices.

I’m going to distribute the accompaniment amongst the brass and strings, starting with the strings and then moving to the brass later and then the combined “band” doing punches with the voices doing a simple long melody. I think that will be dramatic and will allow for good opportunities to build, which is one thing the listing mentions. It looks like the strings won’t be doing much melody on this one.

As far as woodwinds go, I’ll probably use flutes, clarinets and oboes and probably will have them doubling each other playing three note chordal melodies because I’ll need the power. I may have them do some trills or flourishes near the end if it doesn’t make the texture too complex or make the sequencing take too long!

That’s all for now. Time to go boot up the Mac and get rolling!

See the pages of the sketch below (there’s two page 7′s, oops!)

Mazz

If you use a lot of Virtual Instruments (VIs) like I do (or hardware synths for that matter), how do you deal with the situation if you are called to do a re-mix or edit a year or two after you’ve already finished the piece?

What would happen if you’d upgraded your computer and the VI you used for that piece doesn’t work with your new OS and you were called to re-call that piece and submit it for a high end advertising client? Would you be sweating bullets trying to recreate that awesome synth sound that the now obsolete VI could only create?

Why not take an extra few minutes and bounce, or render all your VI and hardware synth tracks to audio before you mix?

I know, I know, it takes extra time, but it really shouldn’t be that big of a deal because you have a template set up already, right?

If you have all your outputs from your VIs already routed to audio tracks in your DAW (for instance assigning the outputs from the Multi page in Omnisphere or the Outputs tab in Kontakt), the it shouldn’t be much more than playing the piece back once or twice, depending on the strength of your system, and recording the outputs as audio tracks.

Another benefit of this approach is to free up resources from your computer that it would normally have to use to process the VIs and direct those resources to all the cool plug-ins that you have but can’t use because your CPU is maxed out from running all those VIs!!

If you find that you would like to tweak a VI part in MID again, just re-load the VI, edit the part and then re-bounce. Since what we do with audio on computers is a constant balance between computer power and our creative ability to stress our computers anyway, this work flow is a good compromise, IMO.

Any thoughts and comments welcome.