Stubbazubba

Thanks for the rock lesson, that will come in handy. I'll add a bass part for sure and revamp the drum part, maybe talk to some people who actually play the instruments and make them more satisfying. Yes, I definitely meant to divisi (and/or bring in the other part on) those string parts. This is just what happens when laziness meets computers. So, would it be better to pitch the voice part low? Like, an F# below the staff at certain points, would that be better than the high D? I'm inclined to say so, just because the mood is much more alto (or contra, at that), than a higher-pitched soprano really conveys. But what would your opinions be?

This is a song I have been writing on and off for almost a year now, and I finally pulled it out and decided to finish it. The lyrics were written first by a lady friend of mine and I offered to set it to music. As things went along I tweaked things here and there and haven't quite told her about it yet. Anyway, this is just my disclaimer; I take no responsibility and want no criticism about the lyrics themselves. I want your opinion on what I set them to; the music, the rhythm, the, yeah, that stuff. Also keep in mind, I am not a drummer nor have I ever played drums, and Finale 2008's Drum Set drove me insane trying to find things that came close to working. I only take partial responsibility for that. And if, uh, anyone can explain to me how the crescendo/decrescendo tool is supposed to work, that would be very beneficial, also. And...can violins actually go that high? Thanks Lyrics (Purely for your entertainment, mind you) What is this feeling I have inside? Hurtful words spoken, but I know we're still tight You say you don't love me but that you care Everyone says we'd be the perfect pair You're the tingling in my skin that haunts me inside Your smile so tenderly touches the sky Your hands, your hands jitter to unknown beats You don't know, I don't know What this means I want to be better in your eyes I want to see the better me after all these lies Lies about me They all get to you Lies about my life only I know aren't true You are in my dreams so dear It is never you that I fear You make it so easy to turn to Him above After my floods of forty You're my dove My life's never easy, 'cause life's never fair, but Life without you friend I wouldn't dare You are my rose among the many thorns You are the sun that will rise in the morn I want to be better in your eyes I want to see the better me after all these lies Lies about me They all get to you Lies about my life only I know aren't true Rumors spreading round and round and All I want to do is be better for you All I want to do is be better in your eyes All I want to do is be better for you All I want to do is to be better in those eyes No more lies AuroraEyes.MID AuroraEyes.MUS

SynthFont home page This is a great, free, tool to play MIDI files with soundfonts, and you can then save the audio as a .wav, .mp3, or several other file types, without needing to do much. Then you can go to sf2midi there and pick and choose your favorite free soundfonts. All of this is free and if you find the right soundfonts you can really create something that sounds pretty good, no sound card required. Here's an example of a piece I made using this procedure after getting the midi from Sibelius. Tempest. Disclaimer; not all the fonts here are good, but some of them are, it's just an example of the results.

I'm glad someone brought this up; the diaphragm idea is one of the most prevalent and misleading misconceptions in wind instrument pedagogy. Not to say that support does not come from your lower stomach/abdominal area, but to blame it on the diaphragm is inaccurate Claude Gordon was one of the most successful trumpet players of all time and re-wrote the books on how to play the darn thing. That being said, he's not always totally correct, and sometimes other methods work a bit better for different people, but 9/10 times, the Claude Gordon method can work wonders; but not quickly. There is no method out there that will increase your range to a high C in any 'short' amount of time, but there are several that will get you there correctly, strongly, and effectively. Patrick Hession, possibly the greatest high note player alive today (RIP Maynard), has a method out, too. There's also The Balanced Embouchure which is very popular and so must be somewhat effective. There's a wealth of places to learn from; get a teacher, and practice your guts out. There is no stronger correlation than that which exists between practice time and results. The trumpet, IMO, is the most flexible of the brass family; it can soar over the big band, speak for the combo, and champion the hero in a symphony. On the other hand, it can also make fun horse whinnies. :toothygrin: That's my pitch for the trumpet.

Visual Jazz Assuming you have a good background in theory (being on a composition website that's a fairly safe assumption), then this will be a great angle to approach improvisation for you, IMO. It's got a bit of artsy, hokey meta-thinking involved, but, it's at least a step up from 'let your heart speak.' If you're in F major, why on earth would you stick to F, A, and C? That's what's already in the chord, we don't need to hear it again! Land on a G, or better yet, a D, stretch the tension, and don't let the audience sit back in their chairs by just reiterating the chord tones; use 'color' tones, it will radically increase the interest in your improv. For the classic improv approach, the industry standard, as it were (that doesn't scream innovation to me, but, hey), can be found at Jazzbooks.com. This is Jamie Aebersold's pretty comprehensive approach; basically, you can learn licks and tricks in every key until finally you can just whip out a pre-programmed line for any occasion. The Visual Jazz method above is more about content generation in the moment, but is nonetheless similar. It's less dogmatic than the Aebersold method, but both produce good results.

I can just see this old guru-type saying, "Let me tell you a tale...," and then we are whisked off to the distant past of a fantastic, let's say medieval with slightly arabic-flavor world, where some great tragedy unfolds right in front of our eyes, like, the hero's brother dies in his arms on the field of battle or something, then we show the funeral (which would either be humble or luxurious, based on the hero's own background), which introduces the hero's love interest who is comforting and consoling him, and then we see them together later, happily ever after, possibly. That's what unfolded in my head as I listened to it. I really enjoyed it. Can't comment on the mechanics much, but it's a good idea. I would love to hear it a little bit longer, and in my opinion the ending seemed a little abrupt, but I enjoyed it much.

Thank you for your responses. OK, so it's not a sonata, I really wasn't sure, and I don't especially care. If I want to call something a sonata in the future, I'll begin with that in mind. I wanted to have the horns an octave higher for most of it, but I put it into Sibelius and it said that those were difficult notes for the instrument, so I moved them down an octave. Although, Sibelius also claims that the trumpets would strain hitting an A, which is ridiculous, if a trumpet player can't play an A, he doesn't have a job. Isn't it a little unusual for a Horn part to be written in the bass clef? I mean, I've seen it for a few bars in a piece or two, but I thought it was kind of odd. And I totally blanked out on dynamic phrasing :P . That would add a much needed dimension to this sucker. I haven't a clue as to what AS Neoclassical is, and no, I did not use the Arrange tool. I'm quite new to Sibelius and I would be afraid to use it. This arrangement was done all on my own (hence my anxiety about it). Thanks again for the responses.

Hi everybody. With school I have taken a long leave of absence, but I'm off now, not that I was a huge presence before, but I have been around before. This is the first piece I have ever arranged for orchestra, and I think I cheated and used shortcuts as much as possible. That being said, let's analyze it properly (according to the rules, at least) 1. Techniques used I really don't know what this is refering to. Um, there are moments of good eighteenth century voice-leading, but I think most of it was just kind of...composed free style? 2. How long it took to compose the piece This is hard to say just because there's been so much time in between things, and memory fades. I wrote the original melody (which is on this site somewhere) I think last summer or so, and I made a finished form (arranged for keyboard) by January, but that didn't go over too well. As I finished my AP Music theory class this year, I looked at this piece again, re-harmonized much of the original melody, tweaked the last section, and then I pulled an all-nighter arranging it from keyboard to orchestra the night before I had to have something in class. 3. Structure of your piece Again, I'm not entirely sure what this is getting at, the form is more or less ABA', but I didn't follow any official form. You could say that there is an introduction followed by the exposition of the theme, a quasi-developmental passage for the strings, followed by a recapitulation of the theme. So you could say it's a sonata. And since Sonata sounds better than tone poem, maybe I should call it that? I dunno, I'm very new to this, what do you guys think? Is she a sonata? 4. Obstacles when composing I wrote the whole melody in a minor key prior to any knowledge of the harmonic or melodic minor scales. When I revisited and re-worked it, I tried to conserve the melody as much as possible, and have done so to a greater extent than I thought would be possible, while still utilizing much more standard procedure V chords and whatever else comes from those scales. Besides this product of my own ignorance and a little laziness, most of the obstacles came in arranging. I just sort of copied and pasted harmony parts which follow the bass line rhythm into the middle voices of other instrument groups. The Bassoon, Tuba, and Double Bass all pretty much play the exact same thing, as do the Clarinets, Trombones, and Celli. Again, my inexperience in arranging is quite apparent, I think, and any tips as to where to go from here would be appreciated. Finally I want to apologize that the sound fonts are a mix match of samples, not all of which work together particularly well. I'm disappointed that I couldn't find a realistic clarinet sample that blended very well (this one sticks out) and the viola part is mostly lost due to both the nature of the attack on its sound font as well as the swell of sound from the chords of the other string instruments. 5. Summary of overall piece This piece is, at times, foreboding, mournful, and certainly angry. I know it's not all that great of an arrangement, nor of an mp3, but I feel like I have truly achieved something, although it's probably like a small child climbing onto the first step and feeling pretty good about himself. MP3: Box.net - Free Online File Storage, Internet File Sharing, RSS Sharing, Access Documents & Files Anywhere, Backup Data, Share Files Sorry, no pdf score. Both the MIDI and the Sibelius file are at about 2/3 tempo, it should be about 96 bpm, and they're at 60, I believe. tempest.mid tempest.sib

Agreed. While that would be terribly interesting to see, it would probably generate some bad publicity. I just had that in there because it gave me the feel I needed to create very cheaply. I'll definitely develop that. In the very beginning that part will not move quite so far (maybe 1-1-3-5 every beat) and it will change with the chords that I now have my first ideas for (I'll post those when I get back to my other computer). This is my game plan for the rest of this; After the introduction of the theme sort of like it is here, I'll probably move into a more erratic-sounding (i.e. syncopated eighths-sixteenths stuff) section featuring some high woodwinds and brass and I'm definitely liking the idea of bass "explosions." Then it will get quiet, and I'll do something short with minimal parts, and from that go into a transition (possibly a full key change) and restate the theme with a lot of overlapping rhythms and hopefully I can end it well.

I must give you the background for this piece; First of all, I'm trying to depict an epic battle between two super heroes who were good friends, but the jealousy of one turned them into tragic enemies. So this scene was in my mind, and one day I'm going through all the special features on the second disc that comes with the Star Wars Episode III CD, and so I hear a lot of John Williams' Battle of the Heroes (Anakin vs. Obi-Wan on Mustafar theme), which has a very similar premise, and then I sit down at the piano and I'm just playing around when the theme the french horns play have. I now have a sound in my head and I get the bit parts and the trumpet ornaments into Finale and I have produced this. However, I am yet to hammer out a chord progression, so the melody remains unsupported except by the sixteenth note runs which don't ever change, although they probably should. Really I'm just looking for your opinion on the theme, because I know that I need to just study composition and especially orchestration more before I try and proceed with this, however any suggestions or comments would be appreciated. Mural for Piano Quartet.sib tempest.MUS

I really like it; it's energetic and driving and at times gracefully bombastic (there's an interesting phrase to drop at the next dinner party). Just one question: How do I download it to my computer?

You may consider swapping the fast sax part (or whatever has that sixteenth pattern behind the melody, I can't tell just what it is from the mp3) with the more melodic flute part; flutes handle that stuff better than saxes, generally, but if you want to push your saxes to excellence, then it's fine (or if you just like that sound better than a flute's). One thing composers (or arrangers, I suppose) do when they take other songs and arrange it for marching band is to add a significantly different intro. This often irritates me, but don't be afraid to write a brief, original theme and slap it on the front of that, then let the drumline take over and establish that groove before the band comes in with the familiar melody. That's probably what I would do.

I enjoyed it. It wasn't thrilling, it wasn't exhilarating, but school projects rarely are, right? Technically, I'm sure it's masterful; you probably know a lot more about that than I do. This is definitely a layman's review. There were some really sweet parts in the beginning, those definitely caught my attention. I kept expecting the brass to go into Pirates of the Caribbean around 1:50, so that caught my attention, too. I must say I really liked the first half of it or so, but the last minute and a half didn't engage my interest as well. But it wasn't bad at all, it just seemed like the first half was better than the second to me.

Without being very technical at all, I like it. It makes me wonder about the subject matter of the tune. It creates a very good end of act mood; a sort of emerging feeling to it, looking forward feeling. Your ending, however, is a little disappointing. It actually sounds like it was cut off on accident. Was that what happened, or is it intentional?

I think this fits into the 'Orchestral' forum better. This is a great, solid piece. But I wouldn't call it a march. A fanfare, maybe, but not a march. Your melodies are just too sweeping and romantic to be a march. I really like your sound. The part at 3:47 or so has a nice gaelic feel to it. Sorry I'm kind of unfocused, I really do like it, but not as a march.