Marcato

About that 3 choices - memorising the tones, developing tone recognition and having a very good relative pitch - I have to say that it's not about relative pitch at all. Actually, a good degree of relative relationships in music obscure the clarity of tones. For example; I cannot hear the tones clearly in heavily chromatic passages because of all the relationships that are on the surface. That's probably because my relative pitch is not that good at all. The other two options - memorising the tones and developing tone recognition - might be true but I cannot see how they differ from perfect pitch. All I can say is, I'm identifying the tones with their own feeling. I don't know if perfect pitch is something else but that's what I'm able to do. ;)

It's interesting that Shostakovich is so liked by everyone... He's kind of pushed aside because of the so called "avant-garde" movements.. A shame of course. My favourite composers, in a roughly chronological form: Gesualdo, Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Penderecki, Ligeti, Schnittke, Gorecki, Rochberg, Reich, Ades.

As I've written before Sibelius doesn't come with a Kontakt player, you have to buy it seperately. About samples; don't buy these for the samples. Instead buy synful orchestra and a decent cheap notation program if you concern is sampling. About ease of use, I've used Finale alot. Then TA's at my school recommended Sibelius. I was saying that Finale was more powerful and professionel and Sibelius can be only good for writing pop tunes. Then I've switched to Sibelius and I think it's both easier and more powerful. Only my 2 cents though... :ermm:

I believe I had developed perfect pitch. I used to hear some notes every now and then about a year ago but it was very vague and random and happened really rarely. Now I can identify any note without any reference. So, yes, it can be developed in my opinion.

I don't think you can do serious orchestral sampling with Reason's orkester refill because there are no special techniques you can use to have the final mix more realistic. No vibrato control, no legato, no marcato, no col legno etcc. It's probably designed for orchestral fills in electronic pop songs. Also it would be hard to use nnxt's with that intention. (You can do that anyway if you know how to use nnxt very well. But it would be easier to use Halion or something like that.)

That intoduction has reminded me of Steve Reich's Desert Music, Movement 1. You have obviously started in a minimalistic style and I certainly don't think that rhythmic ostinato hurts the texture. I do think that you should introduce a new theme (lyrical or something melodic, motivic maybe) sooner or later but I think you should expose the first material in a broader tonal spectrum. In the first page, the music is probably graviating towards G but at the 6th bar you have something like an intermezzo, which is still in G in my opinion, and then you develop the second motive (the motive with the stepwise motion) and the first, repetitive min3 motive loses it's dominance... I think you should include that too in there so you can create a more adrenalised expectation for a new theme at the end of the second page. I though that the music moved away from that first idea fairly fast. But maybe that's just my post-minimalism fan ear speaking. :)

Well... how good does Finale sound? I mean, Finale lined up with GPO (Garritan Personal Orchestra) in 2006. But GPO also made a special Sibelius Edition of GPO, available seperately. And Sibelius also has a Kontakt Player addon, with every orchestral instrument. Now I don't know if you can buy Finale without the samples but you can do so with Sibelius and actually, I've rarely used Finale with the samples because it slows down the computer a lot and it doesn't offer any satisfactory sounds. I didn't even try the Kontakt player or GPO of Sibelius because I don't think they'll work nice either, let's face it good sampling requires lots and lots of hard work and midi programming. So what I do is, I rotate every midi channel to a single, nice piano sample while composing. After I'm done with a large percentage of the composition, I rotate the channels to an avarage (cpuwise) orchestral library. Something like GPO (full) or Synful or Edirol. But I don't depend much on them either. What I'm trying to say is, I don't think those sample sounds are usable in the long run. Look at each notation program and listen to their sample demos. (By the way, I don't know about Finale 2007 and as I said I've never tried the samples of Sibelius... these are just my opinions about general idea) Edit: I've looked at the prices and Finale with the samples equals to Sibelius without samples... Both have nice discounts for students... Take good shots in each, download the demos and use them harshly. I don't know what kind of music you're going to compose but I suggest you to try copying a Stockhausen or Boulez score with each. See which one can do what and how easily? Like I said, the samples might not be a big deal in the long run if you can do something with Sibelius at x time and do it with finale at 4x time. And also I don't know how much you are going to compose and use these programs. Also, it might be just my opinion that Sibelius is easier to grapple with.

I don't know about Notepad but I can say some things about Human Playback... It has nothing to do with samples so it doesn't make it sound like it's recorded in a studio. It just does some basic midi programming to make the performance sound realistic like adding a small ritarando before fermatas or adding some rubatos. I didn't use finale for a while but I don't think they have changed that much. By the way, I would suggest you to look at "Sibelius". It's much easier to use and you can do many things that would be an ache in Finale. I've used Finale from the beginning and I have switched to Sibelius for a year now and I'm happy with it.

You can do that with a german sixth too. Bu beware, because if you do it sudden it sounds like "truck driver's gear change" (ex: nearly all Bon Jovi songs, last chorus:))

db poweramp used to be free. It's a nice converter, maybe you can find some old version somewhere.