johannhowitzer

https://flat.io/score/69ac2e0ec3fb848b0b1ba22e-rainbow-motif?sharingKey=c41a8a0ae1afde60e4d714077a6c63bf9c03d1373a7f7d3f7897743a5aa00cb69e393452925b590a859c557105db3d587e5a8dd6ced3488277ad205afa53e256 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0Ux3ULOuAU Writing a triumphant 8-bar intro in the style of Rainbow Road themes. Tried to vary up the melody and bass rhythms so it doesn't come off as Legally Distinct Rainbow Road. I really like how the descending notes in measure 4 shift to a bit of minor, underlining the return to tonic in measure 5. And the left hand jumps worked out better than I expected. Dunno how much I am a fan of that last flourish on the trumpet, but... on we go!

Good catches on the wrong bass tones, I think maybe I labeled them and then changed the notes after. Regarding the last chord, what I was hearing was more a dominant, as a kind of deceptive cadence back into a climb. Set up the phrase to resolve and then instead of resolving, go back into tension.

It's been a long time! I used to frequent this forum in my 20s, now I'm 42 years old, living abroad, haven't really written any music in the last decade, but I never fully gave up on writing music. It's time to fix my writer's block. I'm setting up this topic as a challenge to myself. Writing music in my 20s was something that came very slowly and painfully as I am a massive perfectionist and not terribly disciplined. So this plan is designed to cure me of that. - Only writing fragments for now. No aiming for completed pieces. - Focusing on practicing use of musical elements I like, experimentation over destination. - Loosely tracking my time in order to force something out the door, rather than get stuck on revisions. - Long term learning goal is to build the skills to write hybrid electronic/orchestral music for games. If anyone wants to take on this challenge with me, feel free, and you are welcome to post things here. For my part, the pacing is starting at one small post per week. As I feel able, I may increase that. Music will be hosted on flat.io and eventually Soundcloud, and linked here by Sunday evening USA-Eastern time, which is Monday morning my time. Feedback is welcomed, but I will be trying to take feedback lightly and focus on quantity of music creation, on volume, rather than refining the quality. First entry: https://flat.io/score/69930d12f4b7f4206442ca2c-sus-slash?sharingKey=4f68cd0e43730c91e48416b8978810ab0c63680a3161fb07fbfcbc75e85c135b02a6f15102ff10978621f147508f16a2ade8791783c86664bb7ed9f0e3b671f9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14lZ2g_oCxI For this eight-bar melody, I chose the musical element described in the above youtube video - suspended chords above a slash bass note, essentially sparsely voiced tall chords. I wasn't following any particular progression principles, just whatever sounded good, but trying to follow the structure of the chords described in the video. Couldn't quite nail down the last chord, sorry it's unsatisfying, but according to the rules we are moving on!

siwi, can I add one tool to your listed motif-transformation "toolbox" without stepping on your toes? One of my favorite ways to transform something is to expand or contract an interval or two between two notes. The shape remains recognizable while the context (and perhaps mode) may change. (Example: if the original is C4-G4-A4-G4, you might use G4-C5-Db5-C5.)

I don't suppose you've ever heard Vangelis' Oceanic album, have you?

You've got a great thing going here! The melody is very catchy, especially after hearing it a few times, and the color is somewhat refined. The only thing that seems lacking is at m12 - seems like there should be something more crescendo-ing in the background there. I know your piece is very light, but my ears are wanting something like timpani for that measure, or maybe snare? You have me wanting to hear more. Great work! This reminds me more of Danny Elfman than any of the composers you mentioned, actually.

A good concept and well-developed layering of sounds, but there's also a lot in here that suffers from weak part-writing... or at least that's what my ears are telling me. Most people have trouble emulating established styles accurately (or coming up with their own), including myself, but you have no problem with that. If you go on to study proper voice-leading technique in depth, you can strengthen this good foundation even more. Keep putting tools in your toolbox!

This would go great with a video. I wouldn't listen to this if I wanted to stay awake, though! My dad would get a kick out of this piece probably, he's really into ambient music. There isn't really a recognizable melody, but I doubt you were trying for that. It is what it is, which is good. That's about all I can say for this piece.

You have an interesting sound here, and unlike many works, it's not hurt terribly by the use of MIDI. Some of the latter half reminds me of the style of many pieces from the video game "Sims 2." The harmonic style is very sparse, some of the leaps are Copland-esque, is he one of your main influences? Lots of very open leaps. If I'm going to critique your work any more, I think I probably need to know what you're going for stylistically and technically. Normally a work falls within more conventional bounds - even tone poems can be critiqued based on their success or failure to use color to evoke moods - but your work seems to defy most of the conventions I am familiar with. I will say that I like it... more than I expected, in fact. And the ending may be too abrupt, though this could be just a result of our silly ol' friend, MIDI.

I also can't find out about any serious bugs people have run into through a trial version. ;) I'm going to try to enlist the help of someone on here (maybe Marius, dunno if he'll have the time) in reinstalling Finale and getting the GPO re-setup. Really don't want to tackle it myself, I always forget some element of the setup or get something wrong. This time I'll write down the steps so I can do it myself if it needs to be done again. This will at least be a quick temporary fix and I can get back to orchestrating, and think some more about whether to switch or not. Mainly I just need something that WORKS right now. We have a deadline.

They didn't roll their eyes when I relayed the bug information, they rolled their eyes when I asked for a walk-through on setting up the GPO through Finale, which is pretty hairy but very reproducible. I've reformatted several times. I don't know where my Windows XP disc is, my brother might. Video card is NVidia GeForce 4, recently updated driver (which made Neverwinter Nights stop working, part of why I started playing WoW). It is a slightly old card but has never caused trouble with any advanced graphics from games etc., so it weirds me out that it would have a problem with moving a simple line across the screen. Any idea what makes it start happening? I understand it wouldn't be perfect, but I've heard Sibelius is a bit more user-friendly. How is its interface for the GPO, compared to Finale? Finale makes plugging in the GPO a terrible chore. Edit: Yeah, "more user friendly" is exactly what Mark said. Knew I heard that somewhere. *slap*

Reformatting? That seems drastic itself. I've had no issues at all with my computer apart from Finale, and it would force me to re-setup everything from scratch. I'm thinking of trying one last reinstall for Finale, but I can never remember all the little things you have to do to get everything set up correctly, especially with the GPO in the equation. Is there someone who could walk me through it? MakeMusic has always been less than helpful for that, I've even talked to support people who clearly did not want to talk with me.

What? No, I said there isn't any slowdown. Just volume decrease. *isconfused* Per my original request, is there anyone on here who's worked in Sibelius for a while who can give me a realistic idea of its reliability and capability?

Virus scanner is AVG Free Edition, which is up to date. It does a full scan every morning, and I've never EVER had the sort of systemic problems one associates with a virus. I doubt a virus would target a single program and make only that one program have the same bug periodically over the course of several years. I do run large scores sometimes, but not exclusively, and often these bugs have cropped up when running a simple piano grand staff. Anyway, memory should not affect volume without creating other serious artifacts such as massive slowdown. I'm running XP, and with a full set of orchestra samples loaded I have plenty of "headroom."

Finale 2006 1.43 GB RAM 1.83 GHz processor (AMD Athlon XP 2500+) Defragmented probably at least a year ago, will run the operation tonight Noticed issues since a reinstallation of Finale a month ago, but that reinstallation was instigated by the scrolling-playback issue Used 34.5 GB out of 153 GB hard drive space - 118 GB is free space Don't know about new programs. The only thing I can think of is a recent installation of World of Warcraft, but that certainly didn't have anything to do with it - the problems predate WoW by a long, long time. I don't often add new software, I tend to work with bare bones, my desktop usually has under ten icons on it and the Start menu is similarly tidy. Finale is one of the only programs I have EVER had any issues with, my system has treated me very well.