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That gets the thumbs up from me, it would be great to score that out and give it to a real orchestra to perform (or try to).
You say without any commercial considerations,but I could see that music being used in a Sci-Fi Mars landing film soundtrack type of thing.
I perhaps couldn't handle a 60 minute album of this style, but as interludes between musical themes this sounds good to me.
Hi Feenix, Just heard your piece. Liked it. Don't get caught up in the criticism. Obviously this type of composing/recording is going to have its discontents. Keep true to what you hear and keep plugging! Best, Tom
PS, Back in the 70's, I really liked Isao Tomita. Have you listened to him? He was doing his stuff with the earliest synths, tape loops, etc.
Brilliant!!!
I think this is close to what Herb Tucmandl envisioned as "Orchestral Punk" back in the days when VSL was born. 8-)
(... I did stuff in a similar vein myself during the late 80ies and 90ies, mostly for contemporary ballet and dance performances.)
andyjh, thanks for your comment.
My music does get used a bit by film makers and theater companies. I am actually making it available the local movie makers' resource centre - however, considerations as to what kind of movie it may fit don't influence what I compose. I've been making music to pay the bills for decades. Now, as an "old geezer", I compose entirely for my own enjoyment.
A real orchestra won't be able to perform this, but I do have music that can be performed by an orchestra. For my own personal creative satisfaction, though, VSL is just about good enough. None of the competition measure up to it - that's why I started buying VSL libraries.
Tom23, I still listen to Tomita, in the 21st century!
I reckon most of my inspiration comes from Stockhausen, the work done at IRCAM, Xenakis, Ligeti… and the likes of Morton Feldman and John Adams (and perhaps W. Carlos) from the other side of the World.
Thank you for your encouraging words. I am certainly going to continue working at my very own music, regardless of commercial success or approval.
Some time in the future I want to create a large scale work for orchestra, voices, noises, Moog, and "this kind of stuff", all perfectly integrated and consistent within itself. What I am doing now are sort of sketches, and it is beginning to sound promising to me.
Dietz, thank you for your praise. I missed your post while I was typing my response to the other two...
"Orchestral Punk" - I like that term. I'd associate it with a different kind of Orchestra Abuse, though - something I also have done in the past, but not with VSL ... yet.
I tend to get a bit intimidated at times with the seriousness of people's work here, and how serious they can be about appropriate techniques and styles, so I tend to not post my experiments and fun pieces. Given the positive reactions I am getting, this may change. I also produce orchestral club dance music...
Nice sounds, especially the string clouds.
As long as it is not totally intellectual "Bauhaus" style, it can easily fit any SciFi film or something like Max Payne.
Do you know the "Steve Reich remixed" album ?
I neglected him for nearly 20 years because of an interview in a very old Keyboards magazine, where he presented himself as a total as*******, at least that´s what I remembered.
But out of a sudden I grabbed this album and found it very interesting.
"Come out" is a definitive lesson for anyone loving tape loops and "inside out rolls".
@Dietz - I haven't done any Club Dance music in VSL yet - it's been all "Brand X Cheese" instruments until now. Give me a few weeks, or a month or two, and you'll hear some of it…
@kleoinholgi, I haven't heard the "Steve Reich remixed" album, but I have heard plenty of Steve Reich remixes - some of them sound great to me, and some quite dire.
I listen to Steve Reich's original music, too, and the same is true there. I like some of it a lot, and some of it does absolutely nothing for me. Can this perhaps be seen as an indication that there is a great artist at work, single-mindedly "doing his own thing"?
No, it is music of an atonal kind, very interesting. I am working toward doing some more atonal/concrete type things. It would be also interesting to hear divisi strings among those masses of lower strings. It is true that the samples allow you to do things you couldn't do with live and that is probably the most artistically valid use of samples. And you can do it purely as an experiment, immediately, which is an awesome power to have. I don't think you should call yourself "amateur" - it is worthwhile artistic work you are doing here whether you get paid for it or not.
thanks for listening, Pekay and William. And plase, don't start a flame war about whether this "is" music or not [;)]
Wikipedia has an interesting article, a sort of a discussion about the definition of music: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_music
Anyhow, my position: I made it with the intention to make music, so…
Some people here in Cork, Ireland, refer to some of my work as Sound Art. When I ask them to draw a line between Sound Art and Music, they sometimes get stuck. In my own native language (German) "Tonkünstler" translates into Sound Artist - but in German, it is just another word for a composer of Art Music.
A young friend of mine asked me what I reckoned the difference was between a sound design and a composition, and I got stuck. In the end, we settled on something like "it's probably like the difference between a design and a picture: all designs are pictures, but not all pictures are designs".
William, I tried it - it's quite impossible to tell the difference between divisi and unison strings in these dense clouds of sounds. These are not 150 layered tracks - I'd have neither the computing power nor the patience for doing that. They are synthesized as a single stereo sound event, using granular synthesis techniques with little VSL motifs and some drones as raw material… oh, and by "amateur" I actually simply mean that I don't do it for a living, and that puts me into a position to do it because it is a worthwhile artistic pursuit - or because it is FUN.
Veetguitar and Corte, thanks for listening and commenting. I reckon I'll continue posting some of my "off the mainstream" work. I feel encouraged by the comments I get.
@Veeguitar, I have music streaming from your "music for media" page playing in the background - some very tasty morsels… It's a shame you were not around when I was a child…
@Dietz, der Tonkünstler : I had an idea yesterday evening, and there is a chance you may not have to wait very long at all to hear a VSL re-make of a Club Dance piece I made for Frankie Knuckles' 50th birthday a couple oif years ago.
Thanks for listening!
Back to the subject:
Feenixx, do you go totally by ear when doing these clusters or are there some techniques/guidelines to let them shine?
@veetguitar said:
...
Feenixx, do you go totally by ear when doing these clusters or are there some techniques/guidelines to let them shine?
veetguitar, it's mainly by ear - some people can plan it and get the results they visualize, but I haven't got the experience. I need to keep playing back, the sounds I am working on, tweaking values and parameters, listen again… and again...
A buddy of mine is working towards a PhD in composition, and I draw on his help as a programmer.
There are three different levels at which I manipulate the raw material (which are VSL bounces of short textures, single notes and chords), and the process involves four steps:
1 - visual programming and tweaking the code in a variety of interfaces he wrote, using a programming system and language called Max/MSP, breaking the sounds down into "clouds" of "grains".
2 - spectrum manipulation, courtesy of FFT tools he wrote, performed on the grains
3 - visual programming again - stretching, envelope shaping and re-assembling the grains
4 - there is a very cool Mac program called Metasynth, which is a favourite among "IDM" and other Electronica producers for making "beats". I use it for what looks like sequencing, but it is really a form of re-synthesis. It has a feature called "Image Synth", which lets me paint stereo position, volume and pitch over time from left to right on a canvas. It can handle up to 2048 "tracks" - but for live monitoring and tweaking, I am limited to "only" about 500 tracks. Unless I use microtuning, I can only hear about 110 different pitches.
Step 4 results in audio files, which I assemble in Logic.
