Song Without Words - Horn & Piano

[Rob]

Hi here's a piece for horn and piano I just wrote, it's rather sombre ...

http://www.robertosoggetti.com/SongWithoutWords.mp3" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

below the pdf...

[coder]

... but drops into the major key for the cadence, I think. Nice.

Is that samplemodeling's French Horn I'm hearing there?

[Snorlax]

Roberto...
Another wonderful piece!!

With your permission, I would like to play this at some time, but on euphonium. (Yes, I can play the high D flat concert just fine) Perhaps as a prelude in my church, with my wife on piano.

You MUST compose a piece for the EUPHONIUM. If I win the American lotto, I will commission you.
But in the meantime, if you are feeling generous, I will gladly accept anything you write for EUPHONIUM!!!

If you are unfamilar with the instrument, I can direct you to some live performances of mine, both as a soloist with wind ensemble, and as the third voice in a brass quintet--I play horn parts in my quintet on euphonium, and can read F transposition just fine. AND: I can improvise some as well.

Another possibility for you is a quartet consisting of two euphoniums and two tubas.

PLEASE GO HERE http://www.esnips.com/thumbnails.php?album=490752" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and listen to all 12 selections--they are short except for the full concerto. I am with a brass quintet and a tuba-euphonium quartet, and a wind ensemble for the concerto. All are live on stage.

With respect for your talent,
Jim

[Rob]

... but drops into the major key for the cadence, I think. Nice.

Is that samplemodeling's French Horn I'm hearing there?

thanks, coder! Yes that's the SM horn... good ears you've got!

[Rob]

Roberto...
Another wonderful piece!!

With your permission, I would like to play this at some time, but on euphonium. (Yes, I can play the high D flat concert just fine) Perhaps as a prelude in my church, with my wife on piano.

You MUST compose a piece for the EUPHONIUM. If I win the American lotto, I will commission you.
But in the meantime, if you are feeling generous, I will gladly accept anything you write for EUPHONIUM!!!

If you are unfamilar with the instrument, I can direct you to some live performances of mine, both as a soloist with wind ensemble, and as the third voice in a brass quintet--I play horn parts in my quintet on euphonium, and can read F transposition just fine. AND: I can improvise some as well.

Another possibility for you is a quartet consisting of two euphoniums and two tubas.

PLEASE GO HERE http://www.esnips.com/thumbnails.php?album=490752" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and listen to all 12 selections--they are short except for the full concerto. I am with a brass quintet and a tuba-euphonium quartet, and a wind ensemble for the concerto. All are live on stage.

With respect for your talent,
Jim

thanks a lot, Jim! I'd be happy to have you play the piece... I'll go and listen to your music, I love the euphonium... well, technically I have never seen one, as here in Italy we rather have baritone horns, in concert bands. Is there a huge difference, by the way? Is it a transposing instrument? I'll sure write something for you, as soon as I have some time. Would you like to have a solo (plus piano maybe, or something) or a quartet piece?

[coder]

thanks, coder! Yes that's the SM horn... good ears you've got!

30 years ago I used to review hi-fi gear - now I can't hear 10kHz (and I miss it) Instead I am happy that I can listen to mock-ups of music that starts life in my head, having waited 25 years for this technology - it arrived before my hearing left

Actually, I have been lurking at VI-Control and noted your posts and links - un tipo in gamba! mille grazie - as I recently moved up from Garritan, and it meant re-learning some things. With Garritan, because Overture has such good notational support for it, I hardly ever needed to fiddle with MIDI controllers for what I was doing; if it sounded 'wrong' then I fixed it in the score with articulations, etc - a good lesson there. But I got Ms Sax S in December, and the EWI in the house is a present to my wife and I prefer not to learn a wind instrument from scratch, it has taken time to explore what it can do - that's how I guessed you might have used a samplemodeling instrument. Unfortunately my MIDI keyboard is not quite up to Ms Sax S - too few velocities at the high end, and you need to be into the 100-127 range to get the 'barking' sound of strong attacks out of it.

However, the cool thing when using Overture is being able to adjust velocity, articulations, etc on an individual basis when scoring things out the long way. I find it useful, for example, to customize staccato dots to 85% here or 40% there, and not have to have them all fixed at 50%. When I first slotted Ms Sax S into an existing score, I wondered how well it would work out, because I noticed immediately that samplemodeling had taken note-transition logic inside the instrument, so it seemed on the face of it I would be stuck with their algorithms. Fortunately that hasn't proved to be an obstacle. More of a pain is having to paint multiple MIDI controllers one at a time - I really hope Overture 5 has multiple MIDI controller visibility, as I find there is definitely parameter interaction in Ms Sax S when I lay the MIDI data on.

I am treating Ms Sax S like having to do almost a separate mix-down - not necessarily a bad thing because of the rewards. And it's great to be able to do that in Overture, before exporting the data out to DAW s/w. I haven't yet got around to playing around with EQ and reverbs in a serious mix-down, which I suspect is where samplemodeling's demos sound 'large' compared to my Overture mock-ups. I am still learning this thing, but I can't help being a little curious how it would sound pepped-up by an Aphex Exciter (I don't have any of the studio models - must dig out my guitar pedal to try this).

[Rob]

grazie a te, coder!
Both Giorgio and Stefano Lucato are friends of mine, and I deeply respect their work... I have all of their instruments but the soprano sax, I wonder how cpu hungry it is?
As for Overture, it was for me a discovery that completely changed my perspective... being most a pencil/paper guy, I didn't know there exist applications that were doing both notation and sequencing on such a high level. Now I can't imagine having to do without Overture, it makes composing easier and more enjoyable...
I'd like to listen to something you do with the soprano, if you can share some of your music

Roberto

[coder]

ciao Roberto,

how cpu hungry is Ms Sax S? Useful metrics are not easy... I've just run a quartet piece that also uses one instance of Pianoteq and one instance of SampleTank, and watched the CPU usage in Windows Task Manager. (This is a 4-5 year old Core 2 Duo @2.7GHz running XP 32-bit Home edition in 3Gb, and ASIO buffer is 256). From idling ~10%, I see cpu usage peaking ~30%. I would say this is quite good. But I don't do big orchestration.

I see on samplemodeling's website, the cpu requirements for soprano sax are kinder than for their instruments that use Kontakt. I have no idea if the SWAM engine hits the disk and/or how often. Kontakt, of course, will use DFD, but there I have found that putting the sound libraries on a SSD drive is a real winner (compare the random access times for a SSD and a hard disk, and consider theoretically how much data can be transferred in that 10ms to 15ms over SATA II at 250Mb/s). I don't recall reading anything about the SWAM engine and disks - the SM guys should be able to help there.

I will PM you a link when I have something printed to MP3.

[Snorlax]

thanks a lot, Jim! I'd be happy to have you play the piece... I'll go and listen to your music, I love the euphonium... well, technically I have never seen one, as here in Italy we rather have baritone horns, in concert bands. Is there a huge difference, by the way? Is it a transposing instrument? I'll sure write something for you, as soon as I have some time. Would you like to have a solo (plus piano maybe, or something) or a quartet piece?

The "baritone" is mainly a cylindrical instrument and has a more piercing sound than the euphonium.

The true euphonium is a conical instrument, with a more mellow sound and a larger bore than the baritone. Think flugelhorn one octave lower, or a bigger-sounding french horn. Flugel and horn are also conical, as is the tuba.

I would welcome a piece with piano, a quartet, or whatever you would be kind enough to write. I also play in a brass choir, and arranged a Steely Dan medley, in which I gave myself all the good guitar bits! All the brass quintet pieces on esnips are my arrangements, except for Beale Street Blues, which is a Canadian Brass chart. I play the horn part, as written, on euphonium. Euphonium and jazz band works well, too!
While I can't pay you myself, I might be able to suggest some places where you could find buyers. There is a tuba-euphonium playing explosion worldwide, and the level of performance on these instruments has never been higher.
I started playing pop and jazz music on the euphonium years ago before it was fashionable; a few people heard it back then, and perhaps it planted a seed in their minds.
Perhaps we can continue the conversation off-list?
Thanks,
Jim

[Raymond63]

Mr. Snorlax,

the tuba troubles me. EWQL SO as well as GPO have the tuba. When using them the sound seems rather dull to me, even at high volumes and/or high velocities. It has not that bright sound of e.g. trombones or horns. I looked on Internet for some demo's of Tuba playing and even there the sound doesn't excite me at all. Why is that? Is it the sample lib or the nature of the instrument? When using the tuba I always expect some deep, really brassy sound, rich in tone.

Raymond

[Snorlax]

Raymond,
A good question you ask. This is a common misunderstanding of the tuba. It will be rich and full of overtones, but it will most likely NOT be brassy. Why? Because of the low pitch and because of the conical tubing. The tuba is not brassy for the same reason that the flugelhorn is not brassy--the conical tubing.
I play one of the largest euphoniums made, and I must work very hard to sound brassy.

If you want the tuba range with an edgier sound, try a contrabass trombone or a cimbasso.
Both of those are cylindrical and can really "bark" if you need that sound.

As to tuba samples, I would experiment with some EQ. Settings to boost bottom and midrange. Too much fundamental, though, can cause a dull and lifeless sound.

Btw, the horn is also conical, but its acoustics follow a very unique pattern because of the narrow tubing, the bell flare, and the mouthpiece. The horn has tubing that is the same length as a tuba in F, but much narrower and wrapped much more tightly.
Snor zonder snor.

[Raymond63]

Great answer, many thanks. It is the nature of the instrument.

Raymond

[Rob]

ciao Roberto,

how cpu hungry is Ms Sax S? Useful metrics are not easy... I've just run a quartet piece that also uses one instance of Pianoteq and one instance of SampleTank, and watched the CPU usage in Windows Task Manager. (This is a 4-5 year old Core 2 Duo @2.7GHz running XP 32-bit Home edition in 3Gb, and ASIO buffer is 256). From idling ~10%, I see cpu usage peaking ~30%. I would say this is quite good. But I don't do big orchestration.

I see on samplemodeling's website, the cpu requirements for soprano sax are kinder than for their instruments that use Kontakt. I have no idea if the SWAM engine hits the disk and/or how often. Kontakt, of course, will use DFD, but there I have found that putting the sound libraries on a SSD drive is a real winner (compare the random access times for a SSD and a hard disk, and consider theoretically how much data can be transferred in that 10ms to 15ms over SATA II at 250Mb/s). I don't recall reading anything about the SWAM engine and disks - the SM guys should be able to help there.

I will PM you a link when I have something printed to MP3.

thanks coder, for the info! looking forward to listen to your music...

[Rob]

thanks a lot, Jim! I'd be happy to have you play the piece... I'll go and listen to your music, I love the euphonium... well, technically I have never seen one, as here in Italy we rather have baritone horns, in concert bands. Is there a huge difference, by the way? Is it a transposing instrument? I'll sure write something for you, as soon as I have some time. Would you like to have a solo (plus piano maybe, or something) or a quartet piece?

The "baritone" is mainly a cylindrical instrument and has a more piercing sound than the euphonium.

The true euphonium is a conical instrument, with a more mellow sound and a larger bore than the baritone. Think flugelhorn one octave lower, or a bigger-sounding french horn. Flugel and horn are also conical, as is the tuba.

I would welcome a piece with piano, a quartet, or whatever you would be kind enough to write. I also play in a brass choir, and arranged a Steely Dan medley, in which I gave myself all the good guitar bits! All the brass quintet pieces on esnips are my arrangements, except for Beale Street Blues, which is a Canadian Brass chart. I play the horn part, as written, on euphonium. Euphonium and jazz band works well, too!
While I can't pay you myself, I might be able to suggest some places where you could find buyers. There is a tuba-euphonium playing explosion worldwide, and the level of performance on these instruments has never been higher.
I started playing pop and jazz music on the euphonium years ago before it was fashionable; a few people heard it back then, and perhaps it planted a seed in their minds.
Perhaps we can continue the conversation off-list?
Thanks,
Jim

hey Jim, nice performances! Looks like the euphonium is more flexible (?) then I thought... thank you for the info! sure we can switch to pm...