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...
Thanks for your kind words and feedback, they're really appreciated!