Sampling v live...effect on composition

[reith]

Not sure if this is the right forum - please move it if not.

Maybe because I started composing before this stuff ever appeared on computers I'm now having to differentiate between things I write for sequencer/samples and live musicians. This laptop is fairly slow and I take the point that decent sample management should be on a separate computer, so I caught myself thinking about a work managed down to fit the limitations of my sequencer/samples.

It's slightly different from thinking of a work that could fit the live resouces at my disposal (which entails a huge assumption with orchestral stuff since it implies the hope of acceptance of scores, some of which weren't accepted). More locally, ensemble-ally, it means writing withint the limits of the people I know.

Have others hit this somewhat schitzoid composition problem?

[Thorolf]

Indeed!

Writing for your equipment/musicians is always an issue, where the resources at hand ultimately affect the product. And it’s a good thing. BTW, use Cubase’s freeze tracks function to do a hi-tech rendering of CPU-hungry softwarez Then you free up your CPU to things you cannot do in real time.

Like rendering animated movies

Regards

[Shiva]

I always find this a problem. Do you write a piece intending it to be performed (i.e you create a detailedscore) or do you try to make a realsitic mp3?

[gravehill]

Originally Posted by Shiva

Do you write a piece intending it to be performed (i.e you create a detailedscore) or do you try to make a realsitic mp3?

That's the most important question whose answer pretty much defines everything else, IMO. If you're aiming to get your pieces performed by a real orchestra, the mock-up doesn't really need to be any better than what is enough for you as the composer.

If the mock-up is going to be the piece in its most "finished" form however, we encounter the problem of production vs. composition. From artistic point of view the composition is what should matter but if the production of the piece doesn't live up to the expectations of the audience, no one will listen to it long enough to even begin to determine if the composition is any good or not. That sucks but it's a fact of life...

Consequently, I'm trying to educate myself parallel in skills of composing and producing music. When working with film music I have a couple of times encountered the situation where the director doesn't have any deep knowledge of music and therefore what impresses them (or not) is if it "sounds good". Composition doesn't necessarily have very much to do with that. Of course it's still important because somewhere down the line there are people who know music and care enough to listen to it with a critical ear. But the director is (in my case) always the first obstacle.

Of course, if you don't have any specific deadlines to meet you're in a lucky situation as you don't really have to worry about taking your time with each element until they're perfect.

[Gopher]

Just to chip in my two pence, I've never had anything performed, and when I started writing I was only focused on making something sound good. Now that I have a slightly more specific set of samples at my disposal, I've also come up with that problem - do you write something that is technically correct, or do you write it so that it only *sounds* correct?
I've tried to adapt the way I write so that my work is roughly technically correct in that something can be derived from the score, in the vain hope that I could get some orchestra to play it, but seeing as thats never going to happen I'm rethinking my strategy. Part of the problem is that if you do want to write something with the intention of being performed, you do need to know the rough limits, and doing things that way don't always lend themselves to something that sounds good at all.

[MaestroX]

It hasn't been too bad for me, I always write for a live performance in mind. I've had the great oppotunity to have my pieces performed, usually quite regulary for small ensemble pieces. I play in a woodwind quartet (2 flutes, 2 clarinets) which I arrange and write music for. We play at weddings and general events which brings in a bit of cash and gets my music heard. As far as bigger ensembles i've had a small orchestra play a piece about 2 years ago, and more recently a full symphonic has been practicing my latest piece for performance at the end of this year. Exciting stuff!