Woodwinds!

Been studying woodwinds lately, having played the sax and flute helps a little, but now properly learning to orchestrate for a woodwind in pairs or for quartets, it's a very different beast altogether.

For one, I never really knew the ranges of the other winds - the clarinet is one very impressive instrument! Bassoons too. Mixing all the different timbres together has been quite interesting.

Basically following one of the exercises from the Kent Kennan book: The Technique of Orchestration. Putting up 8 bars of one of Bach's masterpiece chorales, and layering the with those notes.

Really fast feedback in Finale, and with the new GPO4 setup, I think sounds great! I am, thinking of loading up VE Pro and letting the vsl instruments come through though. We'll see.

Finale Printmusic + GPO4

I have had GPO4 since forever, but only last night found a FAQ how to use Finale Printmusic together with GPO4. After installing the files as indicated, I setup another string orchestra score, switching the playback device from the softsyth to the GPO4 libraries in the setup screen.

It actually didn't do anything, but after I removed the original instruments in the setup page and replaced them with the proper GPO4 instruments from the list e.g. KS Violins 1 (keyswitched violins 1) they worked right off the bat.

I only tried simple stuff like staccatos and legato lines, and they seemed to work. Good stuff, as I was really jealous of my teacher's fantastic sounding samples in Sibelius XD Not that GPO brings it up to that level, but at least now I have at least _some_ kind of sampled orchestra with individual patches not a generic "string ensemble" patch to be used for all the string sections.

Spring Snow

A short piece I wrote for my orchestration class :)

Harmonies of Snow

This piece took forever to sequence and mix. I need pancakes.