At 11:53 AM -0400 7/10/02, Tim Thompson wrote: >On Wednesday, July 10, 2002, at 08:30 AM, Jari Williamsson wrote: >>However, a much more serious point here IMO is to use MIDI playback as >>the main "tool" for composition to live musicians. Many books of old >>masters tell you to learn to "hear" the printed score in the head, without >>the aid of a piano (which would translate to computer playback today), >>and I believe there are many benifits of this. > > >Of course your points are extremely valid and important. I have >learned to focus on MIDI implementation in two situations, both of >which have to do with auditioning scores. > >The first situation is a (very well-paying) client who can't really >read or play through a score and know exactly what he is seeing, or >use his imagination when hearing a straight MIDI playback. I find >that if I make the playback pretty realistic--especially in terms of >dynamic and tempo fluctuations--then he has fewer complaints and >there is less work for me in the end. (He does have a very good >ear, and knows what sounds good!)
This is, indeed an excellent point. Clients have even less imagination now than in the days of a solo piano demo. They tend to think that the demo is the finished product, and cannot extrapolate to a live orchestra what they are hearing on the demo. I had one client who spent a whole morning with me selecting and editing string patches because she didn't like the sound, and it turned out that she didn't like the volume they were set at! She didn't even know enough to realize that what was bothering her was volume, instead of responsiveness or timbre or attack or slow release or any of the myriad things that COULD have been the problem. I now have a synth mockup of a cue (really badly done, too, for illustrative purposes) and the same cue played by great musicians in a well-mixed recording, just so I can point out to clients the difference between what they are hearing TODAY and what they will hear once the final product is completed. Also, clients have gotten so used to hearing polished demos (since those are the ones that win the gig) that EVERY situation now needs extra time spent on the clients' "green-light" session. So in this way, computers have not actually decreased the amount of labour, but INCREASED it, as you need to spend extra time polishing the synth mock-up, then getting approval, then recording the work with live players. Any synth demo that needs this kind of polishing is not going to sound good in any notation program; you need to port it to a full-blown sequencer, possibly play it in again to get rid of the strict metronomic rhythm, then hand-pick your patches for each section of the work, (such as F violins, MF violins, P violins, pizz violins, marcato violins, etc.) get the controllers going for musicality, balance it, then on to the next section. <I> don't need this kind of detail to get the sound of a piece I am working on, but the client almost certainly does. This is why I have been silent on the discussions involving better MIDI playback in Finale, because I don't use it at all, preferring Cubase for MIDI projects. As for my composition and arranging students, I consider the most important part of the course to be the playing sessions, where EVERY project gets a read-through by live players. They are learning how to write for breathing musicians, and the best MIDI playback in the world is not going to let them know how live players will react to their parts. They also get feedback from the musicians, which helps them write (as Cecil Forsythe said it) for the people playing the instrument in addition to writing for the instrument. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
