Eurydice

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Michael Willis
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Re: Eurydice

Post by Michael Willis »

Rainmak3r wrote:Late Romantic Symphonic music actually is my first love
Ah, so that is why your avatar is Tchaikovsky! I've been wondering about that for a while.

Years ago I made an ardour template for virtual orchestration:

https://github.com/michaelwillis/virtua ... r-template

I have learned a lot since then, so I don't use this any more and I don't recommend using it in its current state. In particular, the bus routing is way more complicated than it needs to be. (There's a longer story, just ask if you want to know)

If you would find something like this useful, I would be willing to update it.
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Re: Eurydice

Post by Rainmak3r »

Michael Willis wrote:Ah, so that is why your avatar is Tchaikovsky! I've been wondering about that for a while.
Exactly! My favourite composer of all times without any doubts...
Michael Willis wrote:Years ago I made an ardour template for virtual orchestration:

https://github.com/michaelwillis/virtua ... r-template

I have learned a lot since then, so I don't use this any more and I don't recommend using it in its current state. In particular, the bus routing is way more complicated than it needs to be. (There's a longer story, just ask if you want to know)

If you would find something like this useful, I would be willing to update it.
Aaah I should have realized your name looked familiar!! I cloned your repo on github just a few weeks ago :lol:
I never opened it, though, because I first wanted to figure out how Ardour handled MIDI. I also remember finding a similar template for MuseScore made by someone else, and right now I really don't know what would be the best approach. I'd definitely love to learn more about the new setup you've realized, so when the time comes to play with all this I'll definitely bother you if you won't mind :mrgreen:
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Re: Eurydice

Post by Michael Willis »

Rainmak3r wrote:
Michael Willis wrote:Ah, so that is why your avatar is Tchaikovsky! I've been wondering about that for a while.
Exactly! My favourite composer of all times without any doubts...
I can already tell we're going to be great friends. I have his book about harmony as a reference.
Rainmak3r wrote:I'd definitely love to learn more about the new setup you've realized, so when the time comes to play with all this I'll definitely bother you if you won't mind :mrgreen:
The big difference is that I previously used a plugin called linuxsampler-lv2-32chan, which has 16 midi input channels and 32 audio output channels (a stereo pair per midi input). Now I use a related plugin (I think it is linuxsampler-lv2), which takes a single midi input and has stereo audio output.

I originally thought that linuxsampler-lv2-32chan would be better because I could run only four instances of the plugin and have up to 64 instruments, but in practice it made the signal routing really messy. I wanted to customize panning and reverb routing per instrument, so each instrument ended up with a midi track that was routed to one of four busses, each running the sampler plugin, then the 16 stereo audio outputs of each sampler bus was routed to an audio bus per instrument to customize panning and send to one of three reverb busses (front row, middle row, back row). All of that adds up to a LOT of tracks and busses with a LOT of signal routing.

Now days I prefer to have the midi tracks mostly self-contained, each one running its own linuxsampler plugin. Sure, it's not quite as memory efficient, but it's a lot more simple to look at and manage in the mixer. My midi tracks tend to look like this in the Ardour mixer:

[ LinuxSampler ]
[ Fader ]
[ Send to Reverb Bus ]

This way the output of each midi track is audio (instead of midi being routed to a sampler bus), so I can also set the panning right there in the midi track itself. There is not longer a need for a separate audio bus per instrument.

I keep thinking that I should update the template on github, but I haven't carved out the time to make it happen.
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Re: Eurydice

Post by psyocean »

Beautiful music! Perfectly.

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Guitar and synth tales... https://www.youtube.com/user/Psyocean/
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Re: Eurydice

Post by milo »

Thanks for posting this. Very nice work with this track. Tchaikovsky was the master of program music, and this is a solid stab in that direction. (The 1812 Overture always makes me cry.)

This is interesting on many levels. I appreciate the detailed discussion of how you created the track, and I definitely share your frustrations with MIDI editing in Ardour. I have also played with Lilypond some years ago, but it makes for a complicated workflow. And the lack of dynamics in the midi output is quite a limitation. That is actually my biggest complaint about Ardour MIDI -- the poor interface for controlling the note velocities.

But part of the charm of music is working through the limitations of your medium to create something valuable and moving. Yo Yo Ma recorded with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra some years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rudiDsO ... nZmA0NGxis), and he commented that the difficulty of playing Baroque instruments demanded a higher level of skill than his more modern instruments required. He was impressed by how patient the members of the orchestra were with their instruments. As another example, can you imagine the painstaking work it took to produce the Switched-On Bach recordings using modular synths in the 1960s? We have it easy by comparison!

I would say that your recording here succeeds despite the limitations of the tools.
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Re: Eurydice

Post by Rainmak3r »

Michael Willis wrote:I can already tell we're going to be great friends. I have his book about harmony as a reference.
Ah, I never read that. I did read the Principles of Orchestration by Rimsky-Korsakov, another one of my favourites. I was a tough one for me, as while I can very slowly read music (I never had formal training, I'm self taught), it was very hard for me to follow him when he went deep in the music scores for his examples, and I sometimes just gave up... but the book did contain amazing insights and tips on how to combine different sounds and convey different feelings and "volumes" using the instruments available, how to reinforce melodies and harmonies, and so on. I suspect that Tchaikovsky's book on Harmony would be much more complex to process than that :lol:
The big difference is that I previously used a plugin called linuxsampler-lv2-32chan, which has 16 midi input channels and 32 audio output channels (a stereo pair per midi input). Now I use a related plugin (I think it is linuxsampler-lv2), which takes a single midi input and has stereo audio output.

I originally thought that linuxsampler-lv2-32chan would be better because I could run only four instances of the plugin and have up to 64 instruments, but in practice it made the signal routing really messy. I wanted to customize panning and reverb routing per instrument, so each instrument ended up with a midi track that was routed to one of four busses, each running the sampler plugin, then the 16 stereo audio outputs of each sampler bus was routed to an audio bus per instrument to customize panning and send to one of three reverb busses (front row, middle row, back row). All of that adds up to a LOT of tracks and busses with a LOT of signal routing.

Now days I prefer to have the midi tracks mostly self-contained, each one running its own linuxsampler plugin. Sure, it's not quite as memory efficient, but it's a lot more simple to look at and manage in the mixer. My midi tracks tend to look like this in the Ardour mixer:

[ LinuxSampler ]
[ Fader ]
[ Send to Reverb Bus ]

This way the output of each midi track is audio (instead of midi being routed to a sampler bus), so I can also set the panning right there in the midi track itself. There is not longer a need for a separate audio bus per instrument.

I keep thinking that I should update the template on github, but I haven't carved out the time to make it happen.
The LinuxSampler --> Fader --> Reverb Bus is what I've done in this track as well, after that friend of mine educated me on aux sends and using a dedicated bus for a pure wet reverb. Should you update the template there, I know for a fact you'd have at least one voraciously interested and curious user out there!! Hopefully someday I'll be knowledgeable enough about all this tools that I'll be able to contribute to your repo, or others'.

Does this mean you're using Ardour itself to write the MIDI parts, though? Or did you find a better workflow to just use Ardour as the "renderer"?
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Re: Eurydice

Post by Rainmak3r »

psyocean wrote:Beautiful music! Perfectly.

Image
Thanks! And that's the exact picture I chose to use on Soundcloud, as I felt it matched the myth perfectly.
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Re: Eurydice

Post by Rainmak3r »

milo wrote:Thanks for posting this. Very nice work with this track. Tchaikovsky was the master of program music, and this is a solid stab in that direction. (The 1812 Overture always makes me cry.)
There are so many pieces by Tchaikovsky that make me emotional, or unsettle me in a "good" way. As a general direction for this track, for instance, I was inspired by the Hamlet overture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sgrWykm5bw), that is one of my favourites: you may have noticed that the theme it has at the beginning, is reused in a similar fashion at the very end but in an incredibly more sad and funereal way. That's how the "mourning" lyre melody at the end came to be, where it follows the same pattern the lyre had used since the beginning, but conveying a completely different and tragic emotion. Obviously a much more pedestrian approach in my case, but I love working on themes and variations, and Tchaikovsky was a master of that!
This is interesting on many levels. I appreciate the detailed discussion of how you created the track, and I definitely share your frustrations with MIDI editing in Ardour. I have also played with Lilypond some years ago, but it makes for a complicated workflow. And the lack of dynamics in the midi output is quite a limitation. That is actually my biggest complaint about Ardour MIDI -- the poor interface for controlling the note velocities.
Thanks, I'm really glad you appreciated the description of the workflow! It's one of the reasons why I love this place, as it allows to exchange ideas and approaches in a very creative and constructive way.

About Lilypond, it is indeed a bit frustrating because I love it: I mean, it makes me incredibly faster in writing down themes and ideas (I have a folder full of them now), in a way I never was with drawing notes on a music score or using piano rolls; maybe because I work with code and LaTeX every day at work, hwo knows. While it does have some dynamics properties, especially if you use the articulate.ly script, they're very much oriented to music sheet rendering rather than proper MIDI rendering, which I guess makes sense considering it was always the main scope of the project in the first place.

I'll probably stick to it for writing the bulk of the stuff, but that only works if other tools can complement its missing features. For instance, Hydrogen has an easy way to quickly modify the velocities of notes, using bars: if Ardour had similar features, it would be great, but apparently you can only do something like this by selecting each note and using the mouse wheel to tweak it, which feels cumbersome and doesn't give any visual feedback on what the velocities "flow" is, if it makes sense. Rosegarden is often praised as having excellent features in that regard, and by a quick look it does indeed seem to have easy ways to tweak each controller, but I gave it quick try for velocities and it was really cumbersome there too: it did have bars, but you couldn't just change those, you first had to select each note and THEN the velocity bar would become editable, which makes for a very slow process. I guess the problem here is that you can have chords or notes being played at the same time, and so there would be ambiguities on what the bar would refer to, but still... should there be a MIDI editing tool that makes this much easier to work with, that would basically solve it for me!
But part of the charm of music is working through the limitations of your medium to create something valuable and moving. Yo Yo Ma recorded with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra some years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rudiDsO ... nZmA0NGxis), and he commented that the difficulty of playing Baroque instruments demanded a higher level of skill than his more modern instruments required. He was impressed by how patient the members of the orchestra were with their instruments. As another example, can you imagine the painstaking work it took to produce the Switched-On Bach recordings using modular synths in the 1960s? We have it easy by comparison!

I would say that your recording here succeeds despite the limitations of the tools.
That's a very interesting analogy, and quite true! I agree we probably shouldn't complain, when we have such excellent tools at our disposal... :mrgreen:
Thanks for your kind words and feedback, they're really appreciated!
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Re: Eurydice

Post by milo »

Rainmak3r wrote:I'll probably stick to it for writing the bulk of the stuff, but that only works if other tools can complement its missing features. For instance, Hydrogen has an easy way to quickly modify the velocities of notes, using bars: if Ardour had similar features, it would be great, but apparently you can only do something like this by selecting each note and using the mouse wheel to tweak it, which feels cumbersome and doesn't give any visual feedback on what the velocities "flow" is, if it makes sense. Rosegarden is often praised as having excellent features in that regard, and by a quick look it does indeed seem to have easy ways to tweak each controller, but I gave it quick try for velocities and it was really cumbersome there too: it did have bars, but you couldn't just change those, you first had to select each note and THEN the velocity bar would become editable, which makes for a very slow process. I guess the problem here is that you can have chords or notes being played at the same time, and so there would be ambiguities on what the bar would refer to, but still... should there be a MIDI editing tool that makes this much easier to work with, that would basically solve it for me!
You might give Qtractor a spin. Its midi editing interface is far better than Ardour's, and it uses vertical bars to represent note velocities. (Screenshot: https://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/qtracto ... /max/max/1)

Ardour represents note velocity by color, and that just doesn't work as well. Human vision is much better at comparing the sizes of objects than their colors.
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Re: Eurydice

Post by Michael Willis »

Rainmak3r wrote:Does this mean you're using Ardour itself to write the MIDI parts, though? Or did you find a better workflow to just use Ardour as the "renderer"?
Yes, I use Ardour to capture and edit midi tracks. I know a lot of people don't like Ardour's midi features, but I'm a strange outlier that prefers it over the other options that I have tried on Linux. For what it's worth, I try to record midi tracks by playing them on my digital piano, rather than entering one note at a time (expect for simple things like whole-measure chords and such).
milo wrote:Ardour represents note velocity by color, and that just doesn't work as well. Human vision is much better at comparing the sizes of objects than their colors.
The rumor mill says that Ardour 6 has an overhauled way to represent velocities. I haven't tried it, since Ardour 6 is still unstable and doesn't have a binary release yet, and the developers have been very clear that there is no guarantee about when it will be available.
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