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.

The First Noel

This arrangement took far longer than I wanted. I actually started started and finished writing the arrangement in Finale on Christmas eve. On the 25th, I took a hour or so to record the parts.

The tin whistle recording went generally quite smoothly. The D whistle a more difficult whistle to play compared to the larger whistles; I find it more difficult to maintain a proper stream of air without it doing doing unwanted broken chirps. On the flip side, playing the high notes on the D takes far less air and is so much easier.

My saxophone embouchure has weakened horribly. No surprise, it's been a half year since I touched my alto properly. While I can still hit the overtones and _somewhat_ play in tune, my embouchure got very tired very rapidly. I think I only recorded the sax parts 3 times, and that's with maybe 2-3 practice runs prior. I stopped as I knew I would not be able to maintain it. Which is sad, as I know the sax part is not as good as it could be.

The supporting harmony is also questionable. It kind of works, but I was experimenting with using minors instead of majors, and I think I got lost part of the way, trying to be too smart with the harmony. I think this is mainly being split between the strict classical harmony and ignoring the counterpoint rules all-together. I must make a decision :P Some modern scores I read have open harmony, no thirds, so I need to get my act together.

Not much to say about the virtual instruments, I used vsl flute, piccolo, chamber strings, lithophone and triangle. The sleigh bells was from Nine Volt Audio.

Mix wise, I think the start of the piece felt really empty. I did want to go for a feel of it slowly cresending into the full string orchestra, and on a part I think I succeeded, but it could be done better for sure. Perhaps the strings should come in from the very first bar, but at a super super low level.

Well, on to the next piece!

The South Wind

Woo! Wrote this arrangement a few weeks back. I actually recorded it several weeks ago, but I recorded the whistle first, in the hopes of playing the piano part to the whistle, but it was nigh impossible. Today, I played the piano part, then played the whistle on top. Seemed to work fine.

Done arranging, now "humanizing"

I'm using a solo Oboe instrument in Logic to get a mournful kind of sound I feel that is suitable for the start of the song I'm working on the OCRemix compo. Unfortunately, the solo oboe found within the EXS24 is only has two layers (not even velocity layers!), one of which is vibrato and the other non-vibrato.

After fussing around with the sampler - it is actually quite straightforward for the basic needs I require - but I really would not have understood how it work without youtube. Tutorials rock!

In any case, I decided to drop the vibrato layer, and just use one layer, and utilize the pitch shifter mapped to the mod wheel to create a pseudo vibrato. In addition, the default setup only utilizes the velocity of the keypress for the volume over the length of the note; this is not as flexible as I want as I would like to control how the note dies off over time, and not just end abruptly. To combat this issue, I simply remapped the channel pressure to velocity (manually drawn), so I can get a note that I can control vibrato and volume independently. And now I have to go through my other instruments to get custom variants made. GAH!

Saxophone Log: April 2012

Pretty please with this arrangement, I can't believe it only took today an a bit of yesterday evening. I did spend some time waffling about how to arrange this track, as it's kind of.. iconic? For awhile it was a ballad, then blues, then went to bebop, then back to blues again. Gah. I actually set it up so that some bars from the original were removed in order to fit the 12-bar blues feel.

I started recording once I had the drums, pad and basslines down. After recording, I tweaked the bassline to flow better with the melody, added in some tambourines starting from the 2nd chorus, and added a counter melody on top. I'm quite happy with how the counter melody turned out, as I played the main portion just once, and that's what you hear.

Apart from Addictive Drums, all the instruments used were built into Logic Studio.

Arrangement done, next record.

Working on the monthly sax ballad's backing track, it's done, and need the sax line to be recorded prior to mixing.

The actual song sung by Lionel Richie is just so beautiful, playing an instrumental version of it pales in comparison.

For the instruments, I'm keeping it very simple, Logic's built in piano+string samples form the chords as well as the bass line. Addictive drums is used as well... and that's about it. For now I'm keeping it simple, and focusing on the harmony component. The only thing new I'm trying this time is experimenting with shifting the last chorus up a semitone, so it's main melody -> chorus -> chorus at +1 semitones.

More chord progressions!

Spent the good part of the evening figuring out interesting chord progressions for the monthly sax forum song. Although I'd already done this once, the last few days figuring out bass lines and just playing with chord progression on the keyboard has given me lots of new ideas.

The score on Wikifonia only provided a few chord changes, so it's good practice figuring out the secondary dominants, as well as figuring out that I actually like the vii - I progression alot :3

Next time I approach this, would be from an arrangement viewpoint. Sax as lead of course, but which other virtual instruments this time round? Mmmmm.... :3

EDIT: F7 in the image above is actually Adim. 
Edit 2: F7 is F7 :P