A Little Bach

In previous posts I had mentioned wishing I could get the Garritan Stradivari and Gofriller Cello instruments, but, alas, they are discontinued. There is hope that they will be resurrected and better with the upcoming Garritan Orchestral Strings 2. But, GOS2 is an unknown distance in the future, especially with current developments in Gary Garritan’s personal life, for which we all lift our thoughts and prayers.

Several weeks ago someone offered their used Strad on the Garritan forum. I jumped at it, but missed the opportunity. So, I posted a WTB (Want To Buy) on several forums, and a user over at the KVR forum made me an offer for both the Strad and the Gofriller. The poor guy had to jump through some hoops to de-register them from Native Instruments, but the deed was done and I get them installed on my computer!

I put a number of other projects on the back burner to spend some time learning to use these instruments. I knew immediately that I wanted to try two pieces – a solo violin piece by Bach that a good friend loves to play (on a real violin), and I wanted to do something with the Gounoud Ave Maria that he wrote to go along with Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C Major. That piece is the subject of this post.

One other Bach piece that I like a lot is the Prelude  to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. (Suddenly this piece is all over commercials, such as American Express) I took the feel of that piece and re-wrote the keyboard accompaniment to the Ave Maria for solo cello. I then added the violin over it playing the lead line. Here’s what it looked like after I entered the MIDI data:

The yellow lines are volume data, and the blue line is modulation (vibrato). The Strad and Gofriller are really cool in that instead of using an LFO for vibrato, they use a much more realistic (and complex and computer intensive) method of applying convolution processing to create the vibrato. They have also gone through the painstaking process of aligning all the waveforms of various volumes of each sampled note, so that when you cross-fade between them, you don’t get awkward phase issues.

Not visible in this picture is the tweaking I did to the individual notes. Each instrument comes with numerous “articulations” such as upbows, downbows, pizzicato, tremolo, and more. I just used the main patch, Automatic Mono Legato/Poly Mode for this piece. It’s not a very technically challenging line (at least, for an acoustic player – recreating that on computer is something else).

This mode will give an articulated bowing sound at the beginning of discrete notes that are harsher with higher velocities. Overlapping notes with play with varying levels of portamento that are faster with increasing velocity until you get a nice, smooth legato. Holding down the sustain pedal for a repeated note will cause the sample to switch bowing. I used all of these for this piece, especially the violin melody line.

When I first entered this MIDI data, I used all straight lines for me continuous controllers. I stumbled across a blog post recently that strongly advocates using curves for CC data, and it makes intuitive sense to me, so I tried an experiment. Since I already had all the data in with straight lines, I rendered it that way. Then I went back and made all the data curves and rendered it that way. Both renderings are presented at the end of this article.

This screenshot shows straight lines:

And here it is with curves:

Does it make a difference? You tell me.

Once everything was rendered to audio, went in and tweaked the volume of the cello line in the some places to better fit the ebb and flow of the melody. I didn’t make significant changes, but subtle ones.

Next I added effects. My go-to reverb is Reverberate LE, a convolution reverb. I like it because it takes a stereo IR and applies the left channel of the IR to the left channel of incoming audio, and the right channel of the IR to the right channel of audio. All the other free IR reverbs I’m familiar with combine the incoming audio to mono and apply that to the stereo IR.

For a piece like this with few instruments and large stereo separation, I also like to use one of those “mono” IR reverbs, using a mono omni IR of the same space as the stereo IR. Ever since I re-built my computer, though, I can’t run two convolution reverbs, and I can;t run SIR (my fav) at all!

A little brickwall limiting at the end of the signal chain and we called it done. One other interesting issue I had with this recording, I couldn’t render the Strad. For some reason Sonar ignored all my continuous controller info when rendering. It sounded terrible. And yes, I had all the boxes checked:

As a workaround, I routed the output of my audio interface into the mixer and back into the input of the interface and recorded it as a standard audio track. What a pain in the neck!

Finally, I present to you the two tracks, one with the straight line CC data and one with curved CC data. I’m not telling which is which, because I want to see if you can tell the difference. Leave your guess in the comments.

Bach A

Bach B

It Is Alive!

Finally, after several months of finagling, I have finished building my music computer. I can’t believe how many obstacles there were to overcome, and how many of them could have been more easily overcome by the application of additional money – but we work with the resources available. (Note: this is a very technical, geeky post. If you are only reading this for the music, skip the rest!)

This all started early this summer with the realization that I had pushed the limits of my existing system, and something had to change. The biggest problem was memory – I had filled up my 80 gig hard drive completely. After deleting everything I thought we could spare from the family computer, I still didn’t have enough memory free to install the new Garritan Steinway that I bought.

I started with a plea to friend and family that upgrade, shall we say, frequently. I ended up with a hand-me-down gamer system that absolutely screamed in it’s day. I installed a 500-gig SATA drive and a dual-layer DVD reader (just about all music software is delivered on DVD these days). Not having an operating system, I took advantage of the free Windows 7 release candidate and installed it. At least, I tried to.

Unable to get Windows 7 to install, I tried several versions of Linux – still no luck. I took it back to the friend who gave it to me, and he worked at it for a while. Finally he discovered that the memory was bad. Got that fixed, got the hardware in, and installed Windows. Loved the DVD drive, loved the SATA hard drive, didn’t have any luck with audio output. No matter how I set things, I got break-up and crackling.

In retrospect, I probably could have fixed it, but I was stuck on the fact that my “new” music computer had a 2-GHz Athalon processor, and my “old” Dell had a 3-GHz Pentium 4 – and I knew that it worked. So, I swapped. The gamer machine became my kid’s Internet computer, and the Dell would be repurposed to a dedicated music machine.

Mostly dedicated, I guess. It’s still connected to the Internet, and the larger hard drive on it serves as the family server. But, it was mine. First things, first, need to install the new hard drive on it so I can transfer all my files and wipe the system drive clean!

Hooking up the SATA drive turned out to be a bit of a challenge. Okay, I eventually gave up. I put the struggle in a recent post, so I won’t relive it here. A continuation of that post is that the SATA to IDE adaptor also didn’t work, so I took the SATA drive back to Best Buy and swapped it for a 320 gig IDE drive (320 IDE cost the same as the 500 SATA – ugh). Installed it worked the first time and it was time to transfer files.

It seemed like the file transfer took forever, and it pretty much locked up the computer while I was doing it. I thought, well, we’re using a lot of processing power, so maybe that’s just it.

All the necessary files transferred over, I dropped in my old Windows XP CD that came with the Dell those many years ago and reformatted the drive. Whoops. I had no idea how many drivers wouldn’t work when the operation was complete. I first had to download the driver for the Ethernet port on another computer onto my thumb drive to load it onto the Dell so I could get onto the Internet to download the other drivers!

That done, I started installing my software. (I still haven’t found the Windows Office CD yet). Installation of the various sample libraries onto the secondary drive again seemed to take forever, and locked up the computer while working. Everything installed, I loaded up a very simple song in Sonar with two audio tracks (from the secondary drive) and tried to play it. Ouch! Terrible.

Thinking I did have a problem with the new drive, I went onto the Internet and found a program called HD Tach, which will give you feedback on your drive throughput speed – 2.5 M/sec. I should be getting more than 10 times that.

The on-line help at Western Digital provided the answer. After four (4!) tweaks, including moving jumpers around, swapping cables and a change to the system bios, I had it up to 35 Meg/Sec. No where near the 200 Meg/Sec I should get with a SATA drive, but sufficient for my purposes.

Lastly, I downloaded the latest drivers for my M-Audio interface, and I’m in business! Next post, back to music!

Production Update 10-01-09

From the screenshot, you can see that all the instruments are present and fully accounted for. Compare to the last entry and you can see the progress. The rest of Horn 2, Trombones 1 and 2, Bass Trombone and Tuba have all been tracked.

Looking at the bottom two tracks, the Bass Tbone and Tuba, you can see that they are each one solid take from beginning to end, unlike the earlier tracks that are all broken up into multiple takes.

Before starting this recording, I hadn’t played my WX5 regularly for nearly six months. I was rusty, and the recordings showed that. By this time, I could make it through the entire track without having a train wreck so bad that I had to stop and start over. Granted, they require a fair amount of editing when I’m done.

The super part about MIDI is that I can go back and change notes, note lengths, attacks, even volume over time by editing the MIDI data. I’m not where I can create a screen-shot of that process right now, but I’ll get one and explain it so you can see what I’m doing. We’re also getting closer to an audio example, I hope.

Quick music computer update (yes, I’ve lost count how many months have passed since I first started this odyssey): I determined that the reason I couldn’t install an OS on the machine my friend gave me is because one of the memory cards was bad. I got them swapped around and loaded up Windows 7 with no problem. SATA drive worked, DVD drive worked, USB2 ports on the card worked. But, I couldn’t get the audio output to smooth out. I tried the Windows 7 WDM drivers that others have reported good luck with, and I tried my standard ASIO divers, but everything gave me dropouts and crackles no matter what latency setting I used.

Eventually I gave up and made that the kid’s Internet computer. I swapped the SoundBlaster card into it and gave the kids full admin priviledges so they could install their games. Not sure what I’m going to do when the free Windows 7 install concludes in March. I don’t think they would like to move to Linux – too many of their games probably won’t work.

Anyway, the Dell has a better processor than the new (old) computer, and I’ve successfully been working on it for several years, now. The down side is that it will still serve as our home network server, and still have an Internet connection. Someday, when I have money…

Just to let you know, though, Dell’s are terribly incompatable. With what? Lot’s of stuff. A couple of years ago when I tried to install an Emu sound card, I could never get it working. More recently, the SATA card would not work with the Dell. I suspect it is their proprietary motherboard. Well, I returned the SATA card and ordered a SATA to IDE adaptor, which should arrive today. It will slow my throughput, but I expect not so much that it’s unusable.

If it works, you will be the first to know (after anyone in my house, of course). This entry has turned out much longer than I expected, and if you are still with me, congratulations. Now, go out and get a life.

Seriously, thanks and see you next time.

Production Update Sept-23

I’ve stolen a couple of evenings to work a bit more on tracking Oh Sacred Head. I wish I had taken more screen shots of my progress. That way we could track together all the way to the end.

Anyway, I can play my WX5 despite my broken finger (left ring). Last night and tonight I tracked the rest of Horn 1 (grey track) and  the beginning of Horn 2 (top gold track).

I’ve also discovered a new free convolution reverb that may become my go-to reverb. It’s called Reverberate. Unlike SIR and Cakewalk’s Perfect Space, which sum the inputs to mono before applying the IR, Reverberate takes the left and right inputs, applies the left and right channels of the IR, and sends them out the left and right outputs. They call this “Parallel Stereo“, as opposed to their pay version which is “True Stereo.”

So far I really like the sound and the stereo separation.

Oh, and the new music computer still isn’t working. I can’t get the SATA drive working. A friend will come over (soon, I hope) to help me out with that.

Trumpets In!

I found some spare time tonight and finished tracking the trumpets in Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded.

I’ve been having some issues lately with my WX5. It’s not sending “note off” messages on two notes, now – A and C above middle C (not all octaves, which is strange, and leads me to suspect an internal software issue).

Fortunately, since the instruments are monophonic, the next note stops the previous one from playing, so I don’t get “hung” notes that keep sounding for the rest of the song…

When I started tracking the song, I printed all the parts from Finale, where I wrote it. After I printed them I realized that Finale defaults to the transposed pitch of each instrument. Rather than reprinting the Trumpets and Horns in concert pitch, I decided to track them transposed, and insert the MIDI Transpose FX to bring them back to concert pitch.

Unfortunately, this had the annoying side effect of only transposing the notes when recording and upon playback. When manipulating the notes in the piano roll window (which I need to do a lot) the notes played back as written. This made it difficult to slide a note up or down to the correct pitch by ear.

A plea to the Cakewalk Forum got me pointed in the right direction. It was recommended I ditch the Transpose FX as a permanent fixture on my track and use the Key Offset instead. It’s buried down at the bottom of the track, so was hidden since I had 8 tracks, each with a narrow strip so they would all fit.

This worked great until I started getting another glitch – this one I think being caused by the WX5. Namely, the line I was recording would not stay on pitch.

Since the trumpet is a Bb instrument, the correct transposition to bring it back to concert pitch is -2 semitones. Sometimes, though, I would need to set it to -3, and sometimes to -2. Sometimes it would change each time I recorded a section.

Tonight, no matter what I had the transposition set to, I couldn’t get the WX5 to play in the right key. The existing MIDI data would play back correctly, but all the new stuff as I was playing in would be a 1/2 step either up or down, and I just couldn’t do it. Maybe if I was a better player I could play through it – but not tonight.

So, I bit the bullet and printed out the transposing parts at concert pitch. All this to save a few sheets of paper.

But, the trumpets are in, edited, and I previewed them in a nice large hall/cathedral ambiance.

Sweet.

Production Update 8/27/09

Lots of news – unfortunately, none of it includes an up and running new music computer. That might change this weekend – stay tuned for future posts.

Priase to the Lord the Almighty – Long term readers will remember this as a piano solo that my daughter played a few years ago. I heard an orchestral accompaniment in my head that I wrote out and recorded with Finale and the GPO instruments. At the time she had no interest in playing along with the accompaniment. She had performed the piece long before I had finished the track, and didn’t want to go back.

Well, now she’s changed her mind – only two years later! However, I now need to go back and recreate the track. I have the Finale file, but I’m on a new laptop and the desktop doesn’t have the guts to do the job. I’ve reinstalled the samples on the laptop, but it will take some work and balancing to get back to where I need to be – especially because I want to improve on the original!

In live gigging news, my buddy, Will, has invited me to join him in a duo concert appearance at a local mountain bike rally. He played solo last year and did a great job. I’ve started thinking about what we would do, but since I mostly run in church and kids and kid’s church music circles, I don’t know too much music that will appeal to the mountain biker crowd. Still thinking, though.

Been spending some time on Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded lately. I’ve been tracking the various instruments, and Wedensday night I finished the lead trumpet all the way through. The way I’ve been working has been to track in only the lead instrument in each section, building the song from begining to end. As I finish each line I go back and edit, and then line up the tempo track with what I played. I supposed I have a third of the second trumpet tracked, as well.

I can’t wait to get GPO4 installed on my new music computer to work with the SAM Brass samples. I’m going to give another shot to the music computer this weekend. So far, Windows 7 has caused the Blue Screen of Death, and Ubuntu Studio gives me DVD read errors. Dad’s coming by and is going to bring an extra copy of XP Pro that we’re going to give a shot. If that doesn’t work, the computer goes back to the guy I got it from to see if he can make it work. He used to build computers for a living, so he’ll probably have more luck, but it will cost me free piano work. I’m still jazzed about Windows 7, though. I’ll detail the music computer when it’s up and running.

Lastly, the new music computer is the main reason that I haven’t finished This is My Father’s World. I need more hard disk space, and the new 500G drive is sitting in the music computer, waiting to be accessed… that and I want to use some of the new sample libraries on it and they won’t load into the old desktop – because there’s not enough hard disk space!

Postscript: why can’t I keep an mp3 player working? My third one, and second iPod, stopped working Wednesday night. I dropped it 12 inches onto a carpeted floor and now it won’t turn on, reset or synchronize. I frankly love my iPod, and have grown quite addicted to podcasts lately – listening as I ride my bike. Hopefully it won’t be down for long!

Back to Work

So, I’ve spent most of the summer out working on a highway for 10+ hours a day. I basically didn’t do any music from the end of April to, well, yesterday.

I did take a notebook in and worked a little on songwriting over my lunches, but the total effort expended was truly negligible. Fortunately, that negligible effort was enough to get me over the hump on the lyrics for a song that I started writing over three years ago.

If you take a look at the photo on my CD cover from the live worship CD, it’s a picture of a country church. This is the old Bethel Church, somewhere in Missouri. The photo was taken by a friend of mine and many of his ancestors preached at or attended this church through the 18 and 1900’s. It is now sitting empty and abandoned.

The photo, however, inspired the cover for the CD project, and a song. The jist of the song is the story of a young boy who would spend summers at his Grandfather’s farm, and his Grandfather was also the pastor of that church.

I started with the first four lines of the chorus, and that’s all I had for over a year. Then one day when I took the kids to the park, I took a notebook with me and wrote the first two verses and the rest of the chorus. Finally I wrote the bridge and last verse over this summer (actually sat down and did it in one sitting under a maple tree outside of our field office).

Last night I found myself with some free time and no family in the house, so I took the opportunity to sit down and work out the melody. I’ve actually been thinking about the melody for several weeks now (ever since I finished the lyrics). I worked for a while at the piano, and then moved downstairs to the music computer (which bears a strong resemblance to the kid’s Internet computer) and put the first verse and the chorus into Finale in lead sheet format.

After a while working on that, I switched over to note entry for O Sacred Head, Now Wounded, which some of you may remember is a brass chorale I’ve been working on for the new CD project. Thus, the photo at the beginning of this entry.

It’s tough playing 8-part polyphonic music one instrument at a time. At least, when there’s a certain rubato feel to the tempo. I’m using my Yamaha WX-5 to play in the parts, rather than a keyboard, because I want the volume and timbre changes to occur very naturally (why I bought the WX-5 in the first place). While it’s tough, so far I’m pleased with the results.

Last news – with some excess cash this summer I picked up two pieces of software: Garritan Steinway and the new Garritan Personal Orchestra 4. Unfortunately, I can’t use either one, as my music computer has a full hard drive! Not to worry, I’m in the process of building a dedicated music computer that won’t be on the Internet, and will have a 500 gig audio drive. All I need now is to get an operating system installed and I’m im business! So, where did I stash that XP install CD-rom…

Said Goodbye to an Old Friend Tonight

I tuned the Yamaha grand at church for the last time tonight. Even if the gentleman coming tomorrow to look at it doesn’t buy it, it shouldn’t need to be tuned again before it’s sold.

I’ve never been attached to an instrument before, and was somewhat taken aback by my emotions tonight as I tuned it. I’ve played better pianos – at Piano People in Champaign where I worked for a year I had the priviledge of playing some of the finest pianos in the world – freshly re-built Steinways from the 20’s and 30’s. But, they came and went out the door. I started playing this piano in 1997, shortly after we started attending.

I’ve lead a lot of worship services from this piano, and played a lot more. It graced the cover of my first CD (although, ironically, was not heard on it) and was what I played on my second CD (the live worship one). As the church piano tuner for a decade I have tuned this piano more times than any other instrument by an order of magnitude (possibly two). I’ve also replaced nearly a dozen broken bass strings (none since we got the personal in-ear monitors, though. Possibly connected…)

But, times change. The church changed it’s vision for praise and worship, and the piano was set aside for a digital keyboard. It’s spend the last year off to the side of the platform on the floor. The musical style changed and I moved on to children’s ministry. I haven’t regularly played any piano for over a year, now.

The church offered the sell me the piano at a discounted price, but we’re still in the “Debt Snowball” stage of Financial Peace University, and could only have afforded roughly a third of the already low price.

I have to say, though, the saddest part of the evening was when I played the piano after tuning it. Not that playing it was that sad (kinda). Rather, I couldn’t believe how much of an edge had come off my chops in the last year. I’ve got to find an excuse to start playing regularly again.

Production Update – 05/29/09

I’ve moved forward on a number of fronts, without completing anything. Thus, a production update post.

First, I’ve found a couple of hours with an empty house over the last several weeks, and put them to good use doing some acoustic recording. Recorder recording, to be exact. I created a dummy MIDI file of Father’s World with a very simple, low-CPU synth playing the parts. Then I record take after take of the lead Recorder parts. Each of the four recorders is on a different track, and when I have satisfactory recordings of all of them, I will EQ and level balance (and pitch correct and adjust timing) until I’m happy. Then everything will be bounced to a single audio track and imported into the main project.

I’m still somewhat frustrated by how small my window is on the Tenor recorder for the lowest notes. Once warmed up I have about 10 minutes worth of takes with the lowest notes and then I just cannot produce them. Last night I lost the lowest three notes – not matter how softly I blew into the instrument, it overblew into the next octave with a powerful squawk! However, I think I got usable stuff last night and began the process of manually pitch and time correcting the material (And yes, if I was a better Recorder performer with more expensive instruments, I night not have to digitally correct my playing.)

Last weekend I headed back over to Will’s house for a few hours to do some work on his song, Eyes of a Child. After he recorded the final tracks for voice and guitar, I wanted to tweak some of the piano parts a little to fit. I ended up making two more significant changes to the piano part – deleting a small part of the bridge that was superflouous (and leaving the remaining notes more significant) and re-recording the ending. Listening to the ending I thought that the guitar and piano playing in the same register as they were lacked impact (and were almost indistinguishable). I re-recorded the piano an octave higher and we’re both thrilled with the results.

I wasn’t happy with the overall ambiance of the piece, but lacking time to fix it there, Will sent me home with the files to mess with to my heart’s content.

(Edit: Will has posted the song)

Finally, I’ve been making quiet but steady progress on Sacred Head Now Wounded. This is the brass chorale (I’m not calling it a fugue anymore, because it really isn’t. It’s still nice, though). I may be most proud of the fact that, disatisfied with the melodiy in the middle of the chorale section, I threw it out completely instead of trying to massage and tweak what I had until it worked. In fact, I threw it out twice.

I’m pretty happy with what I have now, and am in the process of harmonizing it. I’m having to delve back into my memories of voice leading instruction from college back in the early 90’s. I find that if I violate these rules, the results sound muddy and awkward. I guess those old guys knew what they were talking about.

Last item – I’m toying with not pursuing the Deep Deep Love of Jesus (men’s chorus with handbells and organ) and instead looking into taking a chant, possibly the Gloria from the Catholic Mass, and doing some interesting/contemporary harmonizing/building from that. Not sure yet, but was inspired reading a music history text the other night. (Is there something wrong with me that I read college texts on orchestration and music history for fun?)

More later.

Recording Session

I went over to my friend’s house yesterday morning to track a piano part on his new song.  I mentioned it in my most recent Production Update. After we had the rehearsal at his place where we worked out the details of the instrumentation we tracked a scratch for me to take home (recording it with his Zoom H4).

After getting home I decided that I wasn’t going to be able to get a decent track along with the scratch. I just couldn’t get it to sound natural playing along with our rubato take. I contacted Will and we set up a recording date so we could track the song together. After several postponements (we’re both too busy) we had that tracking date yesterday.

I showed up at Will’s house at 9:00 and we got to the business of setting up. He planned on close-miking his voice with a Shure Beta 58 and his guitar with his AKG C414 set to figure-8 mode. By aligning the null of the figure-8 with his mouth, he pretty good separation of the inputs.

I recorded direct-to-MIDI using his digital piano. We both monitored directly off his mixer using the audio output from the piano (no latency). He recorded all three track simultaneously on Sonar with his 1010LT.

We hadn’t played the song together for over a month and were a little rusty. Both of us had independently worked on it the evening before, and both came to the same conclusion that we wouldn’t be able to get “there” until we were together. Right notes, right tempo, etc, but no vibe.

After getting the equipment set up and monitoring situation worked out, we began running. After three run-throughs of increasing quality, we decided to go for a take. Would you believe that the first take we made it about 45 seconds into the song and were so screwed up that we just hit “Stop.”

The fourth take was the keeper. We decided before the fourth take that we would concentrate more on flow and vibe than technical perfection – we were compensating for each other’s mistakes, and losing the flow of the song in the process. Live it wouldn’t have made a difference and would be forgotten before the next measure was complete, but in a recording it was unacceptable, and would be nearly impossible to correct in mixing and overdubs.

Satisfied, we dumped the files to my thumb drive and I took them home for editing. The plan is that I will edit the MIDI performance to my heart’s content and sync the tempo track to what we recorded (we recorded free time, without any metronome – my preferred way of recording). Then I will send the edited track back to Will and come over to his place to mess with velocities. The reason being that he will render the final with NI’s Akoustic Piano which I don’t have. Since every piano sample responds to velocity a little differently, I cannot accurately set the piano response at home.

I’m also looking at adding some auxiliary percussion, like shaker and cymbal rolls to the track.

One last note. Over the last several years I have borrowed a large amount of Will’s equipment (his is mostly nicer than mine) and borrowed his services as an engineer while I played at being a producer. I see this work I’m doing with him as some level of payback for all the kindness he has shown me. I was thinking, and expressed to him, that the one thing I’ve never borrowed from him is his musical talent, and am currently working on a song in fingerstyle guitar that he would be able to contribute to wonderfully.

This afternoon I realized that I blew it. He has made a HUGE contribution to my recorded music. What prompted my memory was listening to my live worship CD that I recorded nearly four years ago. He played electric and acoustic guitar on that project, and even added some bass guitar overdubs. That project would have been a fraction of what is was without his contributions.

Thanks, my friend.