Several things are going on here lately. On the music front, I decided to redo the reverb on all the recent classical pieces I’ve posted. They’ve been updated to be a bit more reverb heavy, but with slightly shorter tails. I’m not completely convinced it’s right for The Planets, but it has helped the other two pieces. Oh- and I fired the choir from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony – I replaced it with the choir from Garritan GPO5. The prior Olympus Micro Choir is tutti only, and the piece calls for some vox soloists. It sounds better.
The other thing I’m working on is Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. This project I’m making the transfer from score to DAW via MusicXML. The resulting MIDI and score inside Cubase look a lot better that way. I do have to actualize slashed notes into their real forms for the MIDI output to be correct, and then tell the score to display them as slashed anyway. Bass-ackwards if you ask me. But then who else but a human can tell if those slashed notes are to be distinct sounding (eighths here) or a bowed tremolo? It’s rare to see one in a piano piece though as shown in the attached illustration. Cubase treats the durations as noted despite slashes, it’s up to you to figure out what the composer meant by the slashes. It’s not all bad though, a lot can be figured out depending on the instrument in use.
When importing music via MusicXML, Cubase correctly alters note velocity based on the score’s dynamic markings as far as I can tell. Still, until I am more familiar with just how accurate this is, and maybe a few more MusicXML projects, I am going to stick to putting Cubase’s mapped dynamics symbols on the imported score. This lets me use a MIDI continuous controller for dynamics, which gives a cleaner sounding crescendo. This makes a difference for those instruments that can alter the volume of an already sounding note. Velocity works better for pianos, percussive, and plucked instruments – which can’t realistically alter their volume once a note is struck.
I had my photography gear all dragged out and laying on my bed yesterday. Had to sleep on the couch. I’m going through my gear as I’ll be going on a vacation trip to Europe next month and I want to make sure I have what I need to take with me ready to go. I plan on saturation photography – basically, this will be a whole lot of tourist shots. I figure If I take enough, there will be a few keepers in there. I had to order some new lens caps and a UV filter. Broke the label maker out – was organizing things since I had it all out. Found the charger cable for my camera GPS – phew!