"A fairly ordinary working day" - composition for string quartet

In summer 2012 the Crossover Composition Award was organised, asking for a composition for two violins. So I sat down and wrote a 5 minute composition for two violins. There were great other contributions to this competition, and my composition was not awarded anything.

After the composition was sitting for a while on the metaphorical shelves, I decided to extend it into a string quartet. So in February 2015 I added a viola and a cello voice, changed a few notes in the violin parts, and recorded the quartet again with the Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 sample library.

The result is here on SoundCloud:
http://soundcloud.com/reinhold-behringer/a-fairly-ordinary-working-day-for-string-quartet.

About the composition:

The music follows a program: a typical ordinary working day at the office. It starts out with night, sunrise, awakening, then some morning hectic. Rush hour traffic, fast cars, people running upstairs and downstairs. Then at work. Boring routine job. Daydreaming. Trouble with the boss. The day does not seem to end. Finally the work is over. Rush hour on the way home. Partying. Night.

The exact correspondences of these notions to the music are shown in my synchronous comments that appear when the music is played. I did try to put these notions directly into music, quite literally translating the mood and motion into musical elements.

I hope that you enjoy this music!

Gustav Mahler, Symphony No.1, 3rd Mvmnt (first "beta recording")

Yesterday night I have completed the first "rough" recording of the 3rd movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No.1. This is the first music recorded on the new MAESTRO-2 computer. It is still quite unbalanced; I need to revise some of the instrumental timbres, attack, volume balance. But I decided to put this one out on the web, as a "beta version".

I had produced the very first MIDI "rendition" of this piece back in January 1995. It was one of my first renditions, after Borodin's "Polovtsian Dances" and Smetana's "Moldau". At that time I was still limited by the 16 MIDI tracks of a standard MIDI file, and I had to do lots of tricks to create a reasonable rendition, using the same tracks for different instruments by patch changing etc. A revision in 1998 allowed for more freedom, since I did no longer aim at creating a single 16-track MIDI file but used both my Yamaha MU-80 synthesizer and PC-based softfonts to create an MP3 recording. However, I was never happy with the result - this was just not the right sound, and I always had in mind to revise this rendition. In 2005 I started an attempt to revise this recording by including the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds, but I only managed to get a few instruments converted: problems with an upgrade of the MAESTRO-1 PC prevented me to continue further. That PC simply could not handle the many audio and synth tracks.

Now after the new MAESTRO-2 has been set up, with the latest versions of Garritan Personal Orchestra (GPO 4), Sonar 8.5, the RAID-HD array, and the 12 GB triple-channel memory, I felt that the resources would now be adequate to tackle this piece again. Since the big Gustav-Mahler-Year is coming up (July 2010: 150th birthday; May 2011: 100th death day), I wanted to create something nice for this.

I used 5 instances of the VST synth ARIA, each containing a group of instruments. Unfortunately, the GPO4 instruments do not all cover the extreme notes required by Mahler's music, so I had to add a few tracks of standard Cakewalk TTS-1 instruments for the odd note here and there.

The revision took more work than I originally had envisioned: I had to "declutter" my tracks which still had left in them some patch changes from the original 1995 version, and clean this out. Also, because in standard MIDI the multiple playing of the same note causes phase effects, I had originally "simplified" the score by eliminating those duplicate notes (for example when the first and 2nd violins play the same note). Now, with actually having separate sound fonts available for 1st and 2nd violin, I had to recreate those duplicates again.

Yesterday night I did a "bounce-to-track" and created a WMA file, which can be accessed on my Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra website.

I still need to revise several things:
- the overall sound balance is not ideal.
- the brass sounds "too metallic" for my taste, needs to be softer.
- some individual notes are too loud, some phrasing (attack) needs to be corrected and equalised.

I could wait and post only the very final finished version, but I thought it would be nicer to show the progression of this recording in public. So I will release once in a while improved version of this recording, following my old VPO paradigm of the "rehearsal room". When the rendition is such that I feel it has reached its final state, I will then move it into the "Concert Hall".

Current Music Projects

Using the new MAESTRO-2 computer, I have begun to set up templates. The gig last week showed that the combination of Sonar 8.5 and Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 are well capable of multi-track recordings - the system did cope quite well with the 250 tracks. What I have not yet tested is the simultaneous playing of several tracks.

I do have a whole shelf full of music scores which I bought in the past 15 years, with the goal of "electronify-ing / midify-ing" them. But since many of my previous recordings are quite inadequate, considering what is now possible with MAESTRO-2, I have decided to re-work each of my old recordings and re-release them. I have already begun with the very first orchestral piece which I midified back in 1995: the first movement of Alexander Borodin's "Polovtsian Dances". This is managable, not a very long piece, I should be able to do this within one week of evening work.

However, I realised that now in 2010-2011 is Gustav-Mahler year: his 150th birthday on 7.July 2010, and the 100th anniversary of his death, on 18.May 2011. Since I consider his music to be among the best ever written, I would like to pay a tribute to these anniversaries. In my repertoire I have 3 renditions of his orchestral works: Symphony #1, 3rd movement; Symphony #4, 3rd movement; and Sympnony #5, Adagietto. I have decided to re-work the 3rd movement of the Symphony #1 and have started on this the past weekend. Is quite a challenge, many tracks, independent instruments, orchestral sound effects. But this is a wonderful piece, and I hope my rendition will do this composition justice.

I plan to use for the first time a rendition in 5.1. Have never done this, although the previous Sonar 4 version did already have surround buses. I imagine that putting the orchestral instrumentation in a true 3D space would provide an exciting more immersive listening experience. This will require some experimentation... I will have to use my consumer grade Dolby Digital 5.1 Decoder for monitoring the mix.

So the plan is to have something ready from the Gustav Mahler oevre by the 7. July 2010, and if possible in 5.1 surround sound. I will keep you updated on this project.

Building a New PC for Music - Part 7: Music Software

A few days ago I got the notice from DolphinMusic that the items have been shipped. And today they arrived - Great! Finally I will be able to make music again. The MIDI interface M-Audio MidiSport 4x4 Anniversary Edition is recognised by Win7 without problems and without extra installation - it works as a standard MIDI interface. However, M-Audio also offers a driver for Win7/x64 on their website, which I downloaded and installed.
I installed Sonar 8.5, only the first DVD. There are 3 more, but I do not need them right now. This is an "upgrade" version, since I do have SONAR4. However, I was not prompted for any previous version key or anything - maybe this comes when I activate it. SONAR has my details on file; however, I ordered this software not through SONAR.
Finally I install the GPO 4.

The system is now ready!
I load the GPO ARIA player, to play a little around with the Steinway piano. No ASIO driver shows up, because I had not yet installed the ASUS XONAR ESSENCE sound card drivers. For the other on-board soundcard there are the 3 choices MME, DirectSound, and something that I did not yet know: WASAPI. All three of them could only be set to use a buffer of 4096 bytes - and while playing live this caused a significant delay. Quite disappointing.

Starting up Sonar, trying the TruePiano: sounds a bit tinny, no comparison to the rich and full GPO Steinway sound. But at least the latency is low, so I can play live and improvise. But still, a buffer setting too low results in audio cracking.

The overall first impression of this new system is quite disappointing: I thought the performance would be better.