Coming soon!

PIE > CAKE!!!

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Mozart Sonata K V 545 1st Movement Alternate Version

The idea for this video was to get a performance that sounded as if it were played by a computer. I took out all tempo changes but left in the phrasing (I can't stand all these unphrased midi performances, they hurt my ears!)

One of my favorite film composers is Wendy Carlos. I was going for the feel rather than explicit recreation of her work. I am thinking more of Switched on Bach than Tron here.

The instrument I used was provided by Arturia. They gave away the Minimoog V Original free for a single day. This is an excellent synth to be giving away for free. It does have some bugs. Gift horse and all that. The one topic that is discussed constantly is how close to the original instrument does it sound? Is it a 100% accurate recreation? I am not so concerned with the percentage. Is it 70? 95%? Who cares? It sounds like a moog, and it sounds freaking awesome. And it was free. A win win really.

I want to do a third version of this piece. I was thinking of using a FM synth for the next one. Who knows?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvM1bjw-L0M&feature=youtu.be

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Mozart Sonata K V 545 1st Movement

I really enjoyed making this video. It was challenging in some ways. This has to do with the way the piece was composed. After spending some time with it, I am convinced that 'facile' refers more to compositional technique than to difficulty in playing. I don't mean that it is a simple piece; rather I mean that it is very simple in its construction. The whole thing is pretty much constructed from scales and arpeggios. This offers some difficulty in interpretation: how to phrase a bunch of scales and arpeggios and not make them sound boring? Well, I did my best!

I ran into a problem while making the visualization for this video. I could not get the audio to line up to the MAM player output. I eventually came to the conclusion that the MAM player does not like tempo ramps. I treats the ramp like a step, thus the misalignment problem. I think this is what my problem was a while back with the Für Elise video. In any case it was a great excuse to use the Zgame visualizer again. Can you tell which preset I like? Yeah, that one.

I have a confession to make. I am a hoarder. A hoarder of vsti's. I have bought a fair number of them, and I have found more freeware instruments than anyone should have. Synth1 (freeware) has over 8,000 presets for example. And that is just one of them.

So I need to use all of these for something. It also turns out that I am deeply interested in interpreting timeless masterpieces using new instruments. I can only imagine what Mozart would have done, had he had access to something like NI's Reaktor. Well, we can only guess. However we can hear his music using these instruments.

I will combine my psychotic urge to download every free vsti (even the bad ones) and my interest in using them on classic masterpieces. There will be another version or two of this movement using some as yet to be determined synthesizers. I can't wait!

http://youtu.be/Xdviq2UYbR0