Thread: Movement 4 of my first symphony

Hi!

I finally was able to make a recording of the 4th movement of my first symphony. It is still (of course) a computer simulation, but better then nothing. So try not to hear the metallic fakeness... Hope you like it! Some things were impossible to get right, like the harp glissandi that I really like.

Here is the link to part 4

Here are still the links to the other parts:

part 1

part 2

part 3

The complete score can be read (for free) here:
http://www.lulu.com/browse/preview.php?fCID=500889

greetings!

André, Sweden

Oh, this is very nice!!! I am so surprised no one has commented on this!!!!! Brilliant

Like, good god, are you a film composer? I swear this could be on a number of films.

For some reason the Fourth Movement wouldn't open for me, but I listened to the first three and they are fantastic!

Can I ask you: what is the orchestra playing in these performances? Did you conduct it yourself? And what was the approximate cost to hire the orchestra to perform? I'm thinking it must have cost a small fortune, but perhaps you have some connections that allowed you to save money on it?

This is probably the most complex and impressive work I've heard from any composer on this website so far. Thanks (again) to SenorTearduct for exhuming it--and I can't believe no one commented on it either!

SenorTearduct, check out Andre's website, there's a lot of information about him there.

Originally Posted by SenorTearduct

Like, good god, are you a film composer? I swear this could be on a number of films.

I was on a mission to pull up the better works from the best of the site and this hit no. 1 for me... fantastic, I checked out the web site to. Amazing, this is....

He might like my Yoda-ed sentence.

Hi!
Thanks for the nice words. You can hear all the movements also directly on my site here, those links work for sure:

http://www.andrevanharen.com/firstsymphony.htm

I didn't pay any orchestra to perform it, because it's all done on my own computer! Took me a lot of tweaking, but at least I have something I can let others listen to.

André

Well it is a brillent sample file work!! what programs do you use.. Finale?

No, for notation I use Sibelius, but for the recording I use Garageband on my mac.

Have you tried finale? if so why do u like Sibelius?

I've tried Finale many yeas ago and remember it was very complicated to use. At some point I heard about Sibelius, tried it and never looked at Finale anymore. Sibelius is for me much easier to use. I tried a Finale demo last year, the last build, but still would never go back.

These are computer-generated sounds?

LOL that's remarkable! I've not heard computer sounds this authentic before, I assumed this was a real orchestra performing.

This is a very encouraging revelation to me, as it expands my notion of what notation software can do. I had been procrastinating my own foray into full orchestral compositions, partly because of my aversion to "canned" sounds. Therefore your work is quite an exciting find for me.

Andre, if you are willing to share your knowledge, I would like to hear more about your techniques for getting such a genuine sound, and also your composing work in general. Not to clutter this thread, I will send you a private message about it.

Please, enlighten me also, this is marvelous (and I rarely use that word).

To the OP: Yes, Don't do it by pm I'm sure there#s plenty of people who want to know what you use. Btw I echo the compliments above very nice piece, from all standpoints. Enjoyable to listen to.

To anyone who's interestedWhilst this seems to me to be quite near the top end of what can be done with a computer, even with only a rudimenatry knowledge you can acheive far better results than what you can through playing a midi file through microsoft wavetable.

I'm no expert, but I know these are important:

1) a good syntheiser. For classical music rather than a syntheiser that makes music from scrath you want a good sampler with a good sample set. I'm told that EW QL symphonic orchestra is the best, but it is expensive.

A good sampler will have several different samples for each note played on an instrument for different velocities (e.g. hard and soft) and for different styles of playing (e.g. legato and staccato). It will also modulate the samples and do quite a lot else like signal processing.

With any electronically produced music the quality of synthesier is arguably the most importnat factor.

2) Signal processing. As I mentioned samplers will do plenty of signal processing themselves, but you also might want to add more reverb, some parametric equalizing, stereo enhancers and so onto give even more control.

3) Mixing. You need to consider things like panning, if the same sound is coming out of both speakers then it will sound very flat. You can add movement by making instruments pan around both speakers.

You can also use a midi controller (e.g. a keyboard) so you don't have to go throught the laborious task of adding the dynamics by hand.


I emphasise again that I'm no expert. I've been using sequencers for years, but it's only quite recently I've started to pay more attention to the above 3. But even with not much work and only a little knowledge you can vastly improve on the sound of a midi file played through MS wavetable.

Here is something I did recently (nothing more than a sketch of a passage):

http://soundcloud.com/jcsd/cycle-fifths1

The OP is obviously a better composer than me and better at producing electronic music AND has more expensive tools than me, so I'm not holding it up as a perfect example of what can be acheived. But what it does show is that even with cheap tools, little knowledge and a ham-fisted approach (not a great deal of care was put in to obtaining a realistic sound) you can vastly improve (or I think so anyway, though some parts are better than others) on the awful sound of a midi file played through whatever basic midi player is bundeld with the computer (for Windows computers this will be MS wavetable).

The tools that I used for this recording aren't that special or expensive. Everything happened on my iMac G5 and within the sequencer GarageBand. For the sounds, I used some instruments from Jam Pack Orchestra by Apple and some soundfonts that I bought many years ago on orchestra soundfont collection, still very cheap.

I played every part of the score by hand on my digital piano into GarageBand, even the voices that are doubled instead of just copy and paste them. This, so I would get still little differences between the parts what also would happen in a real orchestra.

All the instruments have their own pan-setting in the stereo field, I took these settings from studying the way an orchestra is seated in a real orchestra and places them accordingly. After this, I did a little bit final mixing with the volume sliders, did some manual tweaking in volume in the parts were necessary.

What I didn't do is using quantize on the parts, I find this a terrible option and it makes a good recording bad if you want to have it sound real. This is a personal thing, other would probably say the opposite.

Lastly, a little reverb and viola, there is the recording that you can hear on this page.

It sounds easy, but it took me a lot of time to get this recording ready, but it's fun to see and hear a work grow like this. I work on a little new piece at the moment, love every minute of it!

André