Leos Janacek, String Quartet No.2 ("Intimate Letters"), 1st Mvmnt.

In 1995 I created a MIDI sequence of the first movement of Janacek's wonderful string quartet No.2, also known as "Intimate Letters". However, the standard MIDI synthesizers are not suitable to play solo strings - their sound is quite awful. So this MIDI rendition was mostly made for the academic purpose of studying the score.

Later I tried to make an MP3 recording using better sounding synthesizers, but the resulting recording still did not sound good. Finally I took the time to rework the MIDI sequence using the Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 samples. And now it was possible to create a more or less realistic sounding music, which conveys some of the qualities of this composition.

I placed the recordings on one single separate page as I am now doing on the Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra site for each uploaded music rendition.

For this recording I configured SONAR 8.5 on the new MAESTRO-2 computer in a spatial surround configuration from the start: violin 1 at the left, violin 2 at the right, viola in the left back, cello in the right back. I had tried to use the sonitus:fx surround filter, but somehow that had created only standard stereo recordings and had only changed the sound characteristics without actually positioning the source in a spatial arrangement, so I had to explicitly place the sources on a surround bus and locate them with the 2D placement tool. This time I disabled all the ARIA reverb and let the source play dry from the synthesizer, centred as basically mono, before applying the spatialization. I then added on each track a sonitus:fx reverb.