ataricom on 6/5/2006 at 09:25
It's 4 am. I'm supposed to start moving my stuff out of my dorm room tomorrow and studying for finals, so what am I doing? Messing around with music stuff.
I want to share with everyone one of my hobbies that I've had for the past 6 or 7 years, computer music recording - an extension of MIDI. Back when I was in 8th grade I downloaded the DirectX SDK and discovered DirectMusic Producer. It's a DirectMusic workstation that I use just for MIDI entry, not very different from Cubase or Cakewalk Sonar. I started messing around with it, putting music I was playing in band on it. No real reason for doing it, it was just something I thought was really cool. Anyway, that evolved to entering whole piano works, marching band stuff I played, and eventually entire pieces of rather challenging band literature (Armenian Dances, La Fiest del Pacifico, Enigma Variations, Varients on a Medieval Tune, etc).
A couple years ago I got sick of the GM sounds and bought Gigastudio 3. That has to be my best investment so far in this rather expensive hobby. Lately I've been basing all my work around the instruments I own for GS3, so unfortunately most of them are not MIDI compatable.
Currently I'm working on La Procession du Rocio by Joaquin Turina (arr. Alfred Reed). I played this my sophmore year of highschool and fell in love with it.
You can download what I have so far (
http://www.geocities.com/ataricom2/laProcession.mp3) here, and a real recording of it right...........(
http://www.geocities.com/ataricom2/LaProcessionReal.mp3) here.
I forgot to mix the percussion in, but oh well, no hard feelings!
This took me about 3 weeks to enter (all by hand, mind you, no keyboard work here!) and a good 4 hours of recording and mixing with Cool Edit 2.
Unfortunately I lost all of my other recordings when I reinstalled XP a few months ago and I haven't gotten around to redoing them yet. Thankfully I didn't loose any of my actual data.
My big goal for the next few years is to complete Mahler's Symphony #3. That shouldn't bee
too hard. I mean, it's only what, 90 minutes long?:p I hope to eventually make a career out of this kind of work, either on computer or (hopefully) in a studio.
Fingernail on 6/5/2006 at 09:44
Antoni Wit and the Polish National Radio Orchestra make it more like 100 minutes.
It is an awesome symphony, though. GOOD LUCK.
The Turina sounds pretty good but I've never heard the real thing.
ataricom on 6/5/2006 at 21:45
Hey, thanks! I've uploaded the recording that was made when I played a few years ago so you can compare real to "computer generated."
