A few months ago (by which I mean over a year), I published this blog post to update you all on the fact that I was orchestrating my piano and vocal score of music set to Blake’s poetry works: ‘Songs of Innocence’ and ‘Songs of Experience’.
Despite the fact that I finished orchestrating it well over a year ago (not all that long after the blog was published, in fact!), I sat on it for a very long time as a result of things such as moving house, focussing more on teaching etc. - but thanks to the wonder of Black Friday I found an offer I couldn’t refuse to help me progress this;
The company EastWest do a subscription to what they call ‘ComposerCloud’. This is all of their virtual instruments and effects for a couple of hundred pounds for an annual subscription, yet Black Friday saw a 50% reduction (£120). Now, I’m not made of money, but that’s a whole lot cheaper than spending hundreds on real instrumentalists and recording space etc. (although, tragically, that is the state of the modern music industry: computers rule, real musicians are becoming all the less valid - from the financial business perspective, of course).
So I downloaded this on Black Friday and forgot about it thanks to getting welcomely waylaid by getting engaged and then Christmas and New Year etc.
And I have taken the first steps in creating backing tracks for when (if) I ever welcome vocalists onto the project (of course this is the plan!)…
Using the example of ‘The Little Vagabond’ (because I do enjoy that one!), here is a screenshot of the orchestration from Presonus software ‘Notion’:
From which I have to export the file as a MIDI file. And this is where the magic happens as this is uploaded into Apple’s ‘Logic Pro X’ - the all round studio software in which you can record audio, but at present I am using it as a sequencer.
A sequencer is a very fancy software that allows you input notes as data rather than sound and then play around with them. Think about the holes on a piano roll for the old pianolas and you’ve kind of got the first idea: the sound isn’t stored on the paper, the data is stored on it. You just load it an it plays it.
With this in mind, each individual note can be shortened, lengthened, increased or decreased in volume and - most importantly - assigned its own sound. Obviously, tracks stick together, so the flute part stays all on one track which overall makes it easy because if you find a good flute sound it just assigns it to the whole track…but if you wanted to have some notes a bit more ‘stabby’ or some a bit more slow on the attack then its fair to say EastWest have gone the extra mile by giving you samples of just about every instrument (orchestral, pop / rock, drums, pianos, synths, even vocals!) being played in all sorts of ways!
Here is how ‘The Little Vagabond’ is currently looking in Logic Pro X:
And to say I am blown away by the results is a slight understatement, somewhat!
Here are some samples of various pieces.
Bear in mind that I have not even scratched the surface yet - I have just assigned default sounds.
Also, because the MIDI data was input into a computer rather than played, the velocity of all notes is unnaturally IDENTICAL! I have not tweaked this yet, so all instruments are kind of doing their thing at the same volume all the way through.
I have used a default EastWest Spaces reverb effect for a little depth which remains to be tweaked, but just listen to the overall realism of the sounds here!:
Eyes peeled for more updates!
Jack Mitchell Smith is a piano teacher based in Congleton, Cheshire. Click here to find out more.
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