Here’s a nice classical piece I just finished! This is Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture – you’ve heard it before. This one has the works, cannons, bells, it’s in there. It’s a commemoration of the Battle of Borodino where Napoleon gets his ass handed to him for trying to invade Russia. In more recent times, it’s often performed on the Fourth of July here in the United States, following a performance in the capitol by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops in 1974. Just remember while you’re lighting your fireworks and swigging your Budweiser in a nationalistic fever, you’re playing ‘God Save the Tsar‘.
This piece was a change in music production workflow for me – for the better. I decided to use MusicXML as the interchange medium between MuseScore and Cubase. This preserves a lot more detail than importing a MIDI file. MIDI knows nothing about tied notes, slurs, staccato’s and so on. MusicXML will bring that notation in for you. There’s still a lot of manual intervention needed, just not as much as before. I need only tell Cubase once how to play a staccato note and it then knows how to play it everywhere it encounters it. Same for most articulations. I’ve been doing things the hard way for a long time – and this is just a massive time saver.
Still, there’s plenty of value in understanding how MIDI works at a low level – there are times when you need to edit MIDI data directly to get a sound voiced correctly. Sometime no other way. It’s good to be able to do that when needed.