Paul... he loves Ginastera... isn't it? [:D]

Wow!

Very nicely done. The dynamics are wonderful.

Phew! Powerfull stuff. Congratulations!

I can hear and appreciate the endless hours that went into producing this. It's exciting that serious concert music can be "premiered" with this new technology.

Congrats,
Jay

@JWL said:

You must tell us how you accomplished this-- seems to have involved some extremely sophisticated balancing-- and one one computer? There's a great lesson in this for rest of us.

JWL, and others: Wow. Thanks for saying such nice things about my work. I hadn't expected that, and I'm gratified to hear your comments.

The following is for those who have asked about how I did this with a single 1.8 Ghz Mac G5:

To accomplish this on one computer, first of all, you have to be poor. I suppose any of us who actually have the VI cube would qualify. This removes the possibility of being able to throw more money at the problem, forcing you to think.

Digression: I was watching Apollo 13 (The Ron Howard movie) and thought, if NASA could do such an amazing thing with the computing power of a Mac Plus (I'm guessing), then there simply must be a way to get my rinky-dink Mac to get me the performance I wanted for David Heuser's piece. Well, NASA had a huge team of very smart people, too. Smart enough to realize that relying on computers to solve their problem would have been foolish. And, more importantly, smart enough to actually solve the problems they faced with their own brains. The point is, the most important part of this is to know very clearly what the end result should be and be very facile with the available tools.

So here is how I did it

I made simple MIDI version in Logic with no VI plugins and got the tempo and spacing between phrases/sections roughly in place. Then I peeled off one instrument group at a time (via "Save As ...") to its own Logic song file.

Then, for example, I opened the Violins file, put in the VI tracks with no reverb or anything else, not even any panning. I then worked on just those instruments until they were right (to me) in this totally dry setting. I kept those god-awful QuickTime MIDI tracks muted. I instead tried to imagine the violins' relative loudness with respect to the other, muted instruments. I then bouned the Violins to a WAV file.

I repeated this procedure with all the rest of the instruments, too, ending up with about twenty separate Logic files, each with no more than four or five VI tracks. Working this way, it was a pleasure to just be able to add a track when I needed, say, polyphonic legato, and not be concerned about whether my Mac would balk. However, this also served to give me a taste of what it would be like to just work and not have to worry about computing resources. [:)]

Next I took the original MIDI Logic file that had the tempo/time signature and saved a copy ... and deleted all the tracks. I then made an audio track for each of the twenty-odd WAV files I now had and just imported all those audio files to the appropriate track.

Dealing with the audio files in Logic was very easy. It was in this final version that I used space designer and the direction mixer to get the space/reverb work done (which I'm really not that satisfied with, still. But that's not a technical limitation, just a limit of my own experience).

I also used hyperdraw on some, but not all, tracks to adjust some balances here and there. I also added a "sub-bass" enhancement to the bass drum part and bit of eq on the horn, violins, basses and piano.

(BTW, I forgot until just now that the piano was not a VI instrument. I used Post's Steinway "Old Lady" and eq'ed it to be brighter. Also, the police whistle I could not find in the VI percussion instruments. So I bought a sound effect from SoundRangers.com for that.)

I did also use an AdLimiter plugin on the Output 1-2 fader, but only a smidgen because some of the stuff was just too quiet.

The main problem I anticipated before I started turned out not to be so bad after all. Namely, that it would be crushingly slow to have to move back and forth between different Logic files to tweak things. It turns out that opening a Logic file with only a handful of VI tracks (that all were optimized, too ... that made a big difference), really didn't take that much time. And so "workflow" pacing was really not bad.

For example, if I need to change something in the Bass section after having already incorporated the audio into the final Logic file, I just closed the final file, opened the Bass file, made the tweak, bounced to WAV (using the same target filename as before), closeed the Bass file and opened the final file. Logic automatically updates the file if any of the component audio files have changed. That sometimes would take twenty seconds. This could become very annoying if you have to go back and forth like that to refine something. But I only had to redo a particular spot maybe about five times at the most. Again, the key is to get it right the first time so you can avoid this rather more tedious method of making changes.

So, I would sum up by saying, if real time, simultaneous processing of all VI tracks is not required, you can work in this manner, provided you have a very clear idea of how all the pieces should be put together in the end.

I readily admit that this is not the ideal way to do it, but the additional time and frustration I anticipated that I might have had to pay for working this way turned out to have been negligible. ... It took me three solid weeks to make the performance, working about 8 hours a day, not including weekends (when I spend time with my kids [:P] )

- Paul

Thanks for the details, Paul - very, very interesting information.

This is the part I liked most, though:

@paulhenrysmith said:

[...] Again, the key is to get it right the first time [...]

[:D]

All the best,

I stopped listening to midi and was just listening to music. I guess that is the best compliment a midi performance can get?

Was this traditionally notated and then you did the midi?

Anyway, this is an impressive performance by Paul and a great composition by Heuser. He is a very imaginative, skilled composer and orchestrator.

@paulhenrysmith said:

...To accomplish this on one computer, first of all, you have to be poor. I suppose any of us who actually have the VI cube would qualify. This removes the possibility of being able to throw more money at the problem, forcing you to think.
...

LOL!!! So true and so encouraging. Never thought being poor would be a plus!

It was quite encouraging to hear from someone else for the first time the actual hours it took. (I've been convinced that I'm just plain stupid of late....) I've often wondered how some guys managed to turn over 20 minutes a music a week for, say, a tv show. In a lot of cases, having three weeks to do a mockup of anything is a luxury where employers always want to hear something "yesterday".

It was most encouraging to read about your general process on one Mac, and a 1.8 at that. So much of what we discuss is in regards to the next best, fastest machines-- and how many of them need to be linked together to pull something like this off with a faster workflow. It really helps to confirm the importance of dedication, diligence, and determination.

I feel a lot better now, thanks to your report. While I'm gradually doing upgrades to by setup to increase productivity and streamline workflow, just knowing that your method is so close to my own renews my commitment to the goal of the MUSIC rather than to get so sidetracked by the technology.

I picked up Miroslav Philharmonik just to avoid GM sounds or synth sounds for the initial MIDI sketches. Currently, I'm in the process of transferring/transporting/translating the Miro sequences into their VI Cube equivalents one section at a time. Dozens of original scores (about 65) are now part of my New Year's resolution to complete with VI Cube. Ay-yi-yi... not enough hours in a single day, but it's nice to know that it is not impossible to pull off.

Thanks, Paul. Your posts are at once unexpected and refreshingly insightful. I'm still struggling to get my farms and petting zoos put together-- but it's nice to know that even the humblest of setups can yield great results with the right enginuity.

Gratefully,
JWL

@William said:

I stopped listening to midi and was just listening to music. I guess that is the best compliment a midi performance can get?

Was this traditionally notated and then you did the midi?

Anyway, this is an impressive performance by Paul and a great composition by Heuser. He is a very imaginative, skilled composer and orchestrator.

Thanks Wiliam!

I got the traditionally notated score from Heuser on paper. He also sent me the MIDI output from Sibelius. That's what I started with. I had to do all sorts of stuff to it, though. For example, if oboes play in unison, Sibelius puts two of the same note into the oboe track. You can't easily detect these in Logic, but I had to go through with the printed score and manually delete these notes. It was even worse where celli were divisi in 8 parts and then back to unison. This track had 8 unison parts overlaid on each other ... yuck!

If anyone knows a quick way to select an overlaid bunch of unison notes in Logic Pro, please let me know. I had to click on EACH note by hand and hit delete. It was a fun 30 minutes, though.

I had to make up some of the glissandi in Logic using a bizarre combination of pitchbend and layering of chromatically adjacent pitches in the violins and basses.

BTW, I found there are no glissandi for celli in the cube. Well, there is only a glissando patch for solo cello. So, I had to use that solo patch and layer a few of them in to make it sound like more than one guy (or gal).

I also had to "humanize" a lot of the repeated notes and most of the running eigth-note triplets. It just sounded too wierdly mechanical. I may have over-humanized it, though, in some spots.

Anyway, you get the idea ... a lot of tweaking and stuff went into it. But thank goodness I did not have to enter all the pitches and rhyhms first. Having the default Sibelius output even with its silly crescendos, etc. was better than having to play this stuff in myself

@Another User said:

="paulhenrysmith"]You can't easily detect these in Logic, but I had to go through with the printed score and manually delete these notes. It was even worse where celli were divisi in 8 parts and then back to unison. This track had 8 unison parts overlaid on each other ... yuck!

If anyone knows a quick way to select an overlaid bunch of unison notes in Logic Pro, please let me know. I had to click on EACH note by hand and hit delete. It was a fun 30 minutes, though.

Hi Paul,

It s still note by note but if you lasoo the note that has 8 duplicates (either in score or matrix windows) this should select all eight (or all duplicate notes) then hold down shift key whilst clicking on the selected note - this should deselect one of the duplicates. Then just hit delete and the remaning 7 duplcates should delete leaving a single note.

hope this helps

Julian