YC Collaborative Indoor Percussion Ensemble

Originally Posted by Dev

so, when you export a midi, does it normally turn into whistles, claps, steel drums, and other gobbledygook? Because...mine did.

Edit: Finale 2007

Or it could be that the midi is on channel 10, the percussion channel

Go to your MIDI/Audio menu, open MIDI Setup. Select your Default MIDI Output Device.
Go to Window, open the Instrument List. Make sure all your instruments/staves are on different channels and assign MIDI patches to the staves as appropriate. Sometimes for me, channel 1 does not play, so I just start at channel 2 and go on. Make sure your drums/battery percussion staves are all set to channel 10, or else they won't play right. If any other stave is set to channel 10, you'll hear bells and whistles where they shouldn't be.

And please, everybody make sure you are exporting Type 1 MIDIs, not Type 0 formats.

Anybody else have any MIDI problems?

Originally Posted by EnigmusJ4

Anybody else have any MIDI problems?

No, not yet anyway

just to get the ball rolling I scribbled this idea down,

You hear a marimba, glockenspiel, vibraphone, & zylaphone
Its a "textural" and hypnotic theme.

I don't know if it will work, but whatever

Originally Posted by virtualshock

just to get the ball rolling I scribbled this idea down,

You hear a marimba, glockenspiel, vibraphone, & zylaphone
Its a "textural" and hypnotic theme.

Hmm..... I think we just found our "C" theme for the middle section.... I like this. I think.... change the vibraphone part to chimes and have the vibraphone play some sort of melody on top... maybe the bass drums can do some quick runs with soft mallets... I think we could make something out of this. We'll see what other people come up with, we'll come back to this later.

Oh, and spell "xylophone" correctly next time or you'll find yourself underneath one that happens to be heading in a downwardly direction at a decent velocity... courtesy of ME.

Originally Posted by EnigmusJ4

Hmm..... I think we just found our "C" theme for the middle section.... I like this. I think.... change the vibraphone part to chimes and have the vibraphone play some sort of melody on top... maybe the bass drums can do some quick runs with soft mallets... I think we could make something out of this. We'll see what other people come up with, we'll come back to this later.

Oh, and spell "xylophone" correctly next time or you'll find yourself underneath one that happens to be heading in a downwardly direction at a decent velocity... courtesty ME.

Alrighty Im glad you think you liked it, so if I get a chance tomorrow I will change the instumentation a little .

I a lot better at writing for these instruments then drums and more rythmic percussion, so someone else can write those parts , Since I've never played any of those instuments and lack in sense of rythm

sorry about spelling xylophone wrong, my bad

No, don't do anything with it yet.... I think we can use it when we get to our middle section of the piece, we will change it around and fidget with it when we get there.

Still waiting for those two more people to get this thing going full swing...

Originally Posted by virtualshock

I a lot better at writing for these instruments then drums and more rythmic percussion, so someone else can write those parts , Since I've never played any of those instuments and lack in sense of rythm

First off, you meant "I'm", right?
I would love to handle unpitched percussion- I have always had a knack for writing rhythms. I don't know yet what I would prefer to write for, but this is one of the places that I excell.

Ah, that was the problem - I was using softsynth in finale. Now, though, I've changed it to "default output device" and even in finale itself, all I can get are bells and whistles. Like, writing on the staff gives me those sounds. So...maybe I can just post a picture of what I wrote, with an mp3 accompanying it so you can hear it?

By the way, all I wrote was a short battery-only intro, nothing special really.

It seems you haven't fully grasped percussion staves in Finale, yet, at least not with General MIDI only.... maybe this article will help you. I wrote it to clear up any confusions and as a sort how-to on working with percussion maps and staves.

http://www.youngcomposers.com/articl...aves-in-Finale

As I said before, I'm looking for short motifs and ideas we could use as our main and possibly secondary theme for the piece. I also said I'd be working on the intro myself once we agreed on our main theme. We would like to hear your little tidbit, though.

i think we need to double some of the mallet instruments. like 2 marimbas, 2 vibraphones, etc. It would give us a lot more to work with in the mallet section. and i specialize in all percussion. but mostly mallets