I had been working on a new Vocaloid piece for over a week, but then suddenly stopped working on that one a few nights ago…and I have yet to touch it again.  Tonight, I have instead returned my attention to another project which was incomplete, and how now finally reached its end: “Untethered.”

This piece began when I happened to find a notice on KVR Audio about DRONOS, a new VST plug-in which produces drone sounds.  I downloaded it and tested it, and I instantly had this piece in mind.  Not five minutes after beginning to test it, I was back on the Web site to buy it.

I believe “Untethered” is the first piece I have created which utilizes three separate sound sets other than the default PrintMusic sound set.  There are in fact just three instruments: DRONOS (which plays simple two-note synthesizer chords held for long periods), the A La Grande Piano SoundFont from www.soundsforbeats.com, and a flute from Garritan Personal Orchestra 4. The actual score was composed in PrintMusic, then, as I have tended to do over the past few months, each track was individually exported to a .wav file, and then imported into Music Maker for mixing.

The work in Music Maker is where things really became interesting (to me) from a creative perspective.  The DRONOS sound was modified with EQ to greatly reduce the high- and low-end frequencies, leaving the middle frequencies almost wholly intact, and heavy reverb was also applied.  The flute sound was chopped, split across two separate tracks, then each of those tracks panned to opposite sides; the same chorus, reverb, and delay were added to both tracks, with the left track also being slightly modified via a vocoder plug-in.  The piano sound was copied with the two tracks slightly offset, then each track’s output modified similar to the flutes and the left piano track again slightly modified via a vocoder.

There was one major problem, however, because of the intense reverb applied to the DRONOS sound:  Even though the notes had officially ended, the sound continued.  Therefore, instead of utilizing the output from Music Maker for the final mix, I needed to import that output into WavePad Sound Editor and apply a slow fade to silence at the end.

I rather like this piece    “Untethered” is a little different from anything else I have done, and I may do something similar again.

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One of the things I generally hate in music is when a piece simply fades into silence.  I especially hate it on albums – after all, if the singer/group is to perform those songs in a concert, there is no way to truly fade into silence in front of thirty thousand screaming fans.  I think the reason I really dislike fades of this nature is from nearly two decades of playing piano and saxophone:  Whether practicing or performing, I could never simply fade into silence, and the music I played was not designed that way anyhow.

Granted, there are times when a face into silence tends to work, but in my opinion, that is very much the exception, not the norm.  In my mind, nearly every piece of music should have a definitive end.

But in some cases, it cannot really be avoided, and/or a fade to silence truly fits with the music.  Such is the case with my current piece, “Drifting.”  The general idea of the piece is that someone is drifting on the water with someone special – no real destination, and certainly no hurry to go anywhere.  To that end, a fade into silence makes sense, hinting that the couple will continue drifting together into eternity.

It feels a little odd to be doing something I generally significantly dislike, but it truly does feel “right” in this specific instance.  Perhaps I will change my mind on this once I start working with the vocals, but for now, I do indeed plan to have this piece fade into silence.

Wow – well more than a week since my last post.  Not good

My musical goings-on since I posted the Tools video:

• Computer Music: Without question, Computer Music magazine is an excellent resource, and I spent much of last week combing through the special issue on making dance music.  Although dance music is far from my forte, it was definitely interesting nonetheless, and I also learned some new techniques which can really be applied to many genres of music.
• Ayumi Hamasaki – Part I: Those following my Twitter feed know that I saw Ayumi Hamasaki’s 2007/2008 Countdown concert video on Sunday, and that simply blew me away.  I have been following her music career for 7-8 years, and this was only the second opportunity to see one of her concert videos.  The first video I saw for Ayu was the 2001/2002 Countdown concert video, and it was quite impressive just how much her performance skill had advanced in the intervening six years, and the stagecraft for the 2008/2008 Countdown concert was simply superb – and practically intimate despite being such a massive arena.
• “Drifting:” The reason for elaborating so much about the Ayu concert video is because it inspired a completely-unrelated music piece, which I am working on currently.  I am also making periodic videos of my progress, with the idea that they will be combined and posted to my YouTube page and here to the site to give a sense for how I work when making music.
• Ayumi Hamasaki – Part II: Not surprisingly, I have been listening to Ayu’s music (especially My Story Classical, my favorite of all her CDs) far more often in the past two days.  One of the things I have really liked about her is her willingness to perform with an orchestral background; I think with her, this works so well because her voice is vey well pitched for it, especially for the strings.  That is something I would love to emulate using Vocaloid Miriam – exactly how to do that, on the other hand, is something altogether different, as Vocaloid Miriam has a very different type of voice (British vs. Japanese, somewhat low-pitched vs. high-pitched).

So that is the past 10 days or so in a musical nutshell.  I hope to make some significant progress on the actual score of “Drifting” over the next few days so that over the weekend, I can work on the phoneme tweaking in the Vocaloid Editor, then next week work on the mixing in Music Maker.

I had been considering it for a while, and today, I finally did it: my first YouTube video. This video focuses on the tools I use for making music.

One thing I had not considered is just how long it takes to render and upload videos!  The upload was the most surprising part to me – I have a very fast fiber-optic Internet connection… for downloading; uploading is apparently seriously throttled back by my ISP in order to provide such rapid download times.  Fortunately, I had the foresight to burn the video to CD, transfer to another computer, and upload it to YouTube from there, so that my main computer could still be useful for other things.