Upgraded to Printmusic 2014

Have been using Printmusic 2011 since I started my musical journey, and it's served me very well. I honestly didn't see or have the need for the full version of Finale. The only feature I thought would be very useful would be the indication for out of range notes. Been just checking with my tiny orchestration guide, but the recent Printmusic 2014 release included the out of range note indication, so woot! Upgraded it for a hair under 40 bucks.

Off hand, there are some odd issues with Printmusic 2014. For example, I can't seem to open my EOS reverb plugin interface inside Finale. But the other reverb plugins I got open fine, so I'm wondering if it's something on Audio Damage's end. Upgrading to the latest au had no difference. Annoying. Guess I'll go back to the au matrix reverb.

The first playback of music also stalls on my machine - it does the calculation for human playback, then nada - but stop and re-play and it runs fine, so a little quirk there.

The out of range notes are _somewhat_ helpful, though if I go below the absolute playable range of an instrument, there does not seem to be any difference between the "out of range" for player capability vs out of range for instrument, period.

For example, if I go too high on the flute, the out of range notes show up as orange. Great! Now if I went down to A below C, it still shows up as orange... I would think in a case like this, the notes would display as Red, to indicate I'm scoring something impossible to play on a regular flute.

GPO4 also worked fine with Printmusic 2014, though I needed to upgrade the player (else printmusic will hard crash!) and install some packages as directed on the finale website.

Will be writing my next piece in PM2014, so hopefully the learning curve won't be too difficult!

Rule Britannia for Wind Ensemble

So, after finishing up the quartet version of this piece, I was about to submit the assignment when I realized... I did it wrongly >.>

It was supposed to be for 8 woodwind players, and obviously scoring for half of that wasn't going to earn me brownie points. Sigh.

In anycase, I decided that the original instruments would still be the main players, and the extra instruments for added punch. The piccolo I used to add ornaments - I really love the trill patch - and the english horn for some back and forth with the oboe.

I kept the bass clarinet and contra bassoon mostly out of the piece till the end, using them to add more weight to the lower end, as well as filling in the harmonic gaps.

I also took this chance to add in one of the melodies heard in the Ultima 6 version of Rule Britannia, so that was fun :) 

Also used the vsl miracle plugin, which I thought added alot of mid range thickness, and made the piccolo really sing. Unfortunately, it seems like my notebook is at its limits; 8 vsl instruments, mir pro (conductor and rear mics)  + miracle have the cpu over 80%+, and that's with the buffers at 1024 samples.

Oh well, chugging on to brass next :)

Rule Britannia for Wind Quartet

Spent a few minutes each day the last week to finish this piece, and spent a good half day today sequencing it in Logic. I think overall it's ok, though I am very pleased with the short moment when the flute trill came through, I thought that added alot to it.