1. For every parameter you CAN control, you MUST control.
2. What is full of redundancy or formula is predictably boring. What is free of all structure or discipline is randomly boring. In between lies art.
3. If you find that a worthwhile task requires much more work to do really well than you ever dreamed, you're probably doing it correctly. If you make it look easy, you're definitely doing it correctly.
very much like Disney animation, with the rough pencil tests first, corrections to smooth out awkward bits, and all the sleight of hand that this kind of art form permits to capture an idealized concept that belies that effort involved. The following is intended not as a recipe for good (classical) sequences, but just tips that I learned (by the hard way, you might say). Your comments are always welcome.
- Study your score! Do this not just for the sake of your own musical edification, but for the sanity and ears of your listeners. It is often a good idea to follow a recording or two of the particular score you are working on, in order to see what articulations, dynamics and tempi are "usually" effective (if not to steal interpretive ideas!). Study an orchestration manual if you are not sure what keys instruments are transposed to, or if you don't know what col legno, immer mit Dämpfer or campane in aria mean, as they occur in your score.
- The score as gospel. I think this is an apt analogy (partly tongue-in-cheek). There are good, critically edited versions (e.g. Eulenberg, Boosey & Hawkes), and there are bad ones which are full of mistakes (I won't name names, but some of the earlier French publishers (as late as Debussy's) evidently didn't have good copyists). So if something doesn't sound right, it probably isn't, and check other versions of the piece or a recording. (A good way of spotting missed flats or sharps is to look at the classical editor data, and if there are adjacent notes playing at the same time, it's probably wrong. This usually only applies if you're working on classical music before c. 1930) Make sure the conductor is not one of those who are notorious for ad hoc amendations!
- Choose a technique and master it. There are probably 2 fundamentally different ways (with variations) of sequencing (in general):
- Live sequencing, as beautifully done by Robert Finley and Katsuhiro Oguri. Play the piece, and edit afterwards. This is probably the most "realistic" way of capturing a piece, but terribly time-consuming for accompanied pieces like concerti and chamber music. (It also doesn't help if you're of the obsessive-compulsive (myself included) or perfectionist type.) If the piece is simple enough, or if you have enough patience, playing one line at a time would also work (e.g. Frankie Ho's sequences). Afterwards you can try coordinating the start events to get notes playing together.
- Step-sequencing. I think this is the easier technique to master, especially if you don't play an instrument and want to learn to sequence something quickly. Either a sequencing program or a notation/sequencing program would do, depending on your taste. (I myself use Finale, a relatively powerful, if clumsy, notation program.) The drawback, of course, is the lack of realistic playback--trills played too fast, monotonous tempo, etc. Read on for some of my partial solutions.
- Divide and conquer. I heard that Yo-yo Ma's father made the cellist learn his trade by mastering a small chunk of music everyday. Accordingly, I started out entering notes into Finale one page at a time, including articulations, tempo and dynamics. I reasoned that it's probably better to have something completely done each day, in case I am too busy to sequence for several days. The problem I soon discovered was that one thing you did yesterday may not sound good tomorrow, or that you don't remember what articulation you used for certain staccatos and what note velocity you had for pp. Nowadays I enter all the notes at once, enter articulations, and do tempo and dynamics separately. It made my sequences somewhat more monotonic, but also more uniform and planned (e.g. an fff is really louder than an ff).
- Proofwrite, prooflisten, and proofread. If you're willing to practise 10 hours a day for a concert, you should do so for a sequence, which is, after all, a performance that you have time to perfect post facto. Now that you're not playing the piece yourself, there is no excuse for sloppiness. Who would want to buy a recording (by, as they say, a graduate from Curtis or Julliard playing the Beethoven concertos for the nth time) with flaws, if you're not Horowitz! Also, copying wrong notes verbatim doesn't make the mistakes go away, so check all relevant passages.
A propos the Hindemith adaptation of the Wagner Flying Dutchman Overture, I should probably quote Giselher Schubert in the preface to the score:
"[It] is not a parody of Wagner's music, but rather exactly the kind of music-making described in the title. Hindemith knew this kind of music-making only too well from personal experience as he has played in various concert orchestras in his youth. Hindemith shows how over-tired and uninterested musicians wade through a score with a certain stoic routine, a score which they probably know but have never previously performed together. Unmoved by false intonation or wrong entries the musicians show us all the tricks they use to battle their way through their self-made musical chaos. They finally slip into another piece altogether, which seems to suit them better, but then confidently end up with a finale which makes one shudder!"
BTW, my midi file is dedicated to all midi file makers, some more than others. (The birds and gunshots are mine at the end :]) (And in case you didn't catch what the waltz tune was--it's from Waldteufel's Skaters' Waltz.)
- Controller data. Notes, of course, are only beautiful in the context they are played. I've always tried to make my sequences sound good on generic sythesizers or sound cards, but different implementations of the GM standard makes this hard sometimes. The controllers I usually modify are:
- 1. Modulation (aka vibrato)
- 7. Volume
- 10. Pan (controls position of the channel's sound)
- 11. Expression (like volume)
- 64. Sustain (pedal)
- 91. Reverb.
- Pitch bend. In case you wondered how glissandi and portamento is done:
- Set controllers RPN (100 for MSB and 101 for LSB) to 0.
- Set data entry (controller 6(MSB) and 38(LSB)) to the number of semitones and 128ths of a semitone that you need. For example, setting controller 6 to 12 will allow you to have 12 semitones (1 octave) as the maximum range up and down. The default range is 2 semitones usually.
- Now, at the places where glissando or portamento is required, create curves in pitch bend (NOT a controller!). You should take into account the range you set above. E.g. a curve from pitch bend 0 to 4096 will be a glissando from the original note to 6 semitones above (augmented fourth); a curve from 0 to -1365 will be a sliding from the original note to 2 semitones below--provided that you set data entry to 12. If you set data entry to 6, however, the same pitch bends will give you half the effect (i.e. 3 semitones above and 1 semitone below, respectively).
- Be sure to set pitch bend back to 0 after the glissando passage is done (it is not reset by controller 121, since it's not a controller).
"We all know that it was the earliest concern, the first conquest of the musician to rid sound of its raw and primitive features, to fix to one single note the singing which in primeval times must have been a howling glissando over several notes, and to win from chaos a musical system. Certainly and of course: ordering and normalizing the notes was the condition and first self-manifestation of what we understand by music. Stuck there, so to speak, a naturalistic atavism, a barbaric rudiment from pre-musical days, is the gliding voice, the glissando, a device to be used with the greatest restraint on profoundly cultural grounds; I have always been inclined to sense in it an anti-cultural, anti-human appeal. [on Leverkühn's masterpiece, Apocalypsis cum figuris] ...images of terror offer a most tempting and at the same time most legitimate occasion for the employment of that savage device....This destructive sliding through the seven positions of [the trombone]! The theme represented by howling--what terror!"
Of course, glissando doesn't just represent terror--see the Nielsen 6th Symphony, 2nd movement, where the trombone glissandi (mostly on the tritone) represents one part of the instability and chaos that invades the harmless rhythm (asserted repeatedly and unsuccessfully by the percussion) with humor.
- On rolls and trills. I've often heard sequences which have drum rolls and trills which are either too slow (like 16th notes played in not-too-rapid sequence) or inhumanly fast (faster than a machine gun's rhythm). I've tried in my sequences to find a medium between the two, i.e. that they be trills and rolls that one would recognize as one when played at the tempo you specify. E.g. if 32nd notes are too fast, I go down to 64th notes, but if the latter are too closely spaced, I use something in between (e.g. sextuplets or quintuplets of 32nd notes). Also, if you are making rubato changes, make sure that the rolls are somewhat uniform (e.g. go down slightly in your drum roll divisions towards the end of a ritard.) Again, this is often a matter of experimentation, so listen to your sequences and make changes until you're satisfied.
- On instrumentation. On occasion, Bach played by tom-toms or the bagpipe may sound cute, but in general only Baroque music can be thus mangled. (Imagine Ravel fuming over his Bolero played on the distortion guitar.) For general purposes, stick to the original instrumentation. I tend to use pure Strings Orch 1 instead of the synthetic strings (which usually don't sound kosher on my system), and use solo patches only when it says solo on the score. Flute can be substituted for piccolo, and trombone for tuba if you don't have enough channels. Sometimes you have to improvise on GM or GS. The following are what I've come to use:
- strings played at the bridge--tremolo strings played quickly
- solo voices--choose your wind instrument (I tend to like English horn)
- harp played on a pick--koto
- col legno strings--shamisen in certain cases
- string harmonics--for short notes, use guitar harmonics; for longer notes or special effects, use bowed pad, whistle, ocarina or bottle
- tam-tam--use one of the cymbals patches pitched a octave or more lower. In the Intro to Khovanshchina, I also added tube bells at their lowest register to give more reverbing "noise" that tam-tams usually have.
- muted strings--string orch. 2 (this may not sound well if your string orch. 2 releases slowly)
- nail pizzicato--slap bass 2
- Post-marketing survey. As with vaccines and drugs, you should always test for side effects, expected and unexpected. People with different MIDI setup might not hear the same vibrato frequency you heard, but they are bound to hear wrong notes in prominent places like piccolo or solo violin, especially if they are playing jarring notes together with the tuba or oboe.
- Controller data. Notes, of course, are only beautiful in the context they are played. I've always tried to make my sequences sound good on generic sythesizers or sound cards, but different implementations of the GM standard makes this hard sometimes. The controllers I usually modify are:
- Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, some bits of Die Meistersinger, the Ring (especially Die Walküre), and Lohengrin
- Mendelssohn's Wedding March, including its derivatives (e.g. Rutter's 2nd Childhood Lyric, Ibert's Divertissement 2nd movement (Cortège), and numerous other direct quotations)
- Saint-Saëns' Omphale's Spinning Wheel (middle section)
- Massenet's Manon
- Korngold's Violanta
I've created a newsgroup called alt.binaries.sounds.midi.classical, which deals with exactly that--anything related to classical midi files. Feel free to contribute your questions and answers, discussion about techniques, requests, and--most of all--your new sequences. If your server doesn't carry the group yet, I can email you the original control message, which you can then send to your news server. (Of course you can write your own.)
Some notes on my modest equipment. Initially, I used only Finale 3.5.2 to make midi files, together with Quicktime 2.1 on my Powerbook. (That explains the excessive number of mistakes in my early files, since what wrong notes don't get played on Quicktime won't be heard by me either.) Nowadays I am using Finale to enter the notes, add articulations and instrumentation, and export the file to a sequencer for the volume and tempo details. I only have a PSR-320 as keyboard, but it's definitely better than even Quicktime 2.5, no, even better than Quicktime 3.0.
Some other notes on how to play my files (or any midi files, for that matter). This is only one way, but I like MidPlug, for which my files are balanced:
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