Star of the County Down | Tin Whistle

I found this lovely tune that seems to be very well played on the tin whistle, this is my arrangement.

Saxophone Log: September 2012

Opps, it's been awhile since I did one of these. I have been keeping up the sax on and off - lately I've been having a bout of illness, of which I had major fits of coughing so I've laid of alot of saxy times, and only tooted the horn on and off.

In any case, I really wanted to do this this month, so whilst I was recovering most of this month, I think this bout of sick is more or less over and I hope to return.

I've been thinking about the recording for a fair bit, and previously I was sort of playing into a corner - the Heil PR31BW has a hypercardioid pattern, so it accepts a slight bit of sound from the corner. Today instead, I had my back to a corner of the room, and the rear of the mic pointed towards the tiny hallway connecting my room to the bathroom. I think the signal is clearer and does not sound as boxy as before.

On the flip side, it appears I just had my first encounter with a resonant room mode. I didn't pick up on this until after I put on my VRM box for the final checks, and hear very clearly, a whistling, like flutes, on two of the loud notes. I had to use some serious high-Q on my notch filters to remove it. But by doing so, it caused the body of the instrument to be removed as well.

Annoying, but what I did was split of the section (it was two quarter notes long) and EQ'ed it separately to the rest.

Erm, apart from that I thought my arrangement could really use more umph, some parts just feel dead. Ah well, always next month :)

Elfen Lied | Lilium | Music Box | Orchestral Piano Cover

Another little thing I worked on, sort of a compo to get everyone to compose a piano rendition of this particular anime song and see how everyone does it.

This is the first time I actually ran out of cpu power, and forced me to bounce tracks to disk. Mmm... I still had relatively lots of ram available though, 3+gb out of 8gb. Bouncing to disk ain't no big a deal.

Piano: SampleTekk PMI Old Lady
Strings: VSL Chamber Strings
Horns & Percussion: Kontakt 5 Factory Library

I'd like to add that I spent *alot* of time humanizing the strings, like easily 3, maybe 4 hours, only to have them knocked into the background lol.

A fair amount of time was combining the music box version with the harmony of the original lilium piece (thankfully both were in f# minor), most of it appeared to work when hearing it in Finale, but did not work once sequenced, and had to find alternative chords to make it work. I hope it does!

EDIT: There is actually a fair bit of white noise in the intro as I boosted it up with a gain plug - I actually didn't hear any noise on my speakers or akg 240MK2 headphones. A forum member mentioned the noise and I checked again, not hearing anything.... pulling out my new shure iems.... damn, it's there! Guess I'm putting my iems into my mixing chain as well.

EDIT2: AIEEE! I can hear white noise in my recorded CP33 tracks! 

Finished remix

No audio samples, I'm afraid, but yes I finished up the FF6 remix last night. This little exercise (~40 hours over the last 16 or so days) gave me a lot of though on my instruments, production and composition.


I'll probably write more once we are allowed to post the pieces.

Short summary:
a) I need better melody line instruments - instruments with proper legato for example.
b) I could really do with some monitors and
c) While my harmony is getting up to speed, my humanization sucks bad.

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!

OcRemix: FFVI Compo

http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=39840

Oook, looks like I'll take part in this. So I have to finish up my compo home work AND do a remix of one of the tracks. Gonna be busy :3

Gaia Stage

Gaia Stage

Have to get out of the theory stage and into the practical stage. Here's a quick test of one of the daiko drum elements and shakuhachi in the Garritan World library. Played a bit with the pressure channel to get some vibrato. And some ES2 pads.


Doing this quick shows how difficult it is to get some sort of accompaniment going, even if the pads are just straight chords. My feeble attempts to seek out the chords to fit the melody utterly failed. In the end, I went with single notes that seemed to work, and formed chords from those. Bleh.