The Magical Faun

Hi everyone.

This piece uses the same piano intro and outro as my African/Japanese fusion piece; but the rest is radically different.

I decided to write something that more closely mimics the style of the opening passage.

You can decide whether I succeeded.

This time it was all written in Garage Band.

It has a much nicer piano than the Music Studio app I was using previously, and I think the wind instruments sound more realistic as well.

Not sure if I should try to expand and develop the piece more; or if it's already reached its optimum length?

Made a few tweaks today, and improved the flow of the piece.

Here's the new version:

N.B. The auto-normalisation from GarageBand seems to have produced some nasty peak level distortions in this piece.

Unfortunately I can't turn it off, because Apple have removed that option from GB for iOS!

Tried reducing the volume on each track; but it doesn't help at all.

Am planning to buy a MacBook soon: so I'll re-master the piece once I have GB for Mac.

It doesn't sound bad at all but there's so little done piano-wise in this case imo. On top of that, the flute & piano voices feel a little disconnected from each other at times and I'm not sure where they're going...And then the flute disappears and we reach the end. It's like the intro and ending are in a different, "higher level" than the rest of the piece. Would be nice to check a score if there's one. I think I prefer the first one you made despite its lack of piano voice in the core of the piece.

Kind regards!

Many thanks for listening!

Unfortunately GarageBand has crushed all the life out of this piece with its very poor automatic mastering.

The subtleties and colours I created in the piano part have been obliterated!

It sounds much nicer when played back within GB itself, before the auto-normalisation has been applied.

Apple have also removed the ability to produce a score in the iPad version.

It won't even export a Midi file: so I can't make a score that way either!

I think the only way to do it, is with the full version of GB. So I guess I'll have to wait until I've bought a MacBook. 

The piece probably ends too soon, as you said: so I think I'll try to expand it out a little.