Autumn leaves

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PieterPenninckx
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Autumn leaves

Post by PieterPenninckx »

Hi all,

The most frequent feedback on my previous piece (Attic discoveries) was "I want more". Since I quite enjoyed making that music, I said to myself: "Let's do that again." So I followed the same path ... and ended up somewhere different. The music asked for different instruments, so this time, it's with some woodwinds. It's also more more classical and less sound design. So here it is: autumn leaves. Enjoy!

The setup is Qtractor -> LinuxSampler (managed via QSampler) -> Ardour. All effects are from Calf Studio Gear (I heard there are better, but I haven't installed those yet).

The virtual instruments are:
* Piano: Salamander Grand piano, with some EQ. I removed the sustain pedal sound effect (when pressing or releasing the sustain pedal) since it was a little weird when combined with other instruments.
* Flute (solo): I think VSCO CE 2 (otherwise it's Virtual Playing Orchestra). I used both the vibrato and the non-vibrato patches (and the staccato patch). Since it sounded like these were recorded with different microphone positions, I applied a little bit of reverb on the non-vibrato patch, made everything mono and then stereo again with Calf Stereo Tools, there's also compression and EQ. There was one note where I switched from the vibrato to the non-vibrato patch since the vibrato patch gave weird beatings with another instruments.
* Clarinet: [Maestro clarinet by Mats Helgesson](https://www.polyphone-soundfonts.com/do ... o-clarinet). I used both the "maestro clarinet base" (for the more quiet parts) and the "maestro clarinet legato" (for the rest) and I love this instrument. There's a lot of pirated stuff on the polyphone website, but I think (hope?) this one is ok. Effects: Reverb, compression (in that order, gives a cool effect), EQ
* French Horn (section): virtual playing orchestra.
* Strings (violin 1 & 2, viola, celli, bass, all sections): Virtual Playing Orchestra. For me, the hardest part with strings is to get the note transitions I want (and the sound that I want). I have obtained a copy of Spitfire Audio BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover Edition (by filling in their questionaire) and I tried to see if that could improve things a little, but I had the same problems, so I simply sticked with Virtual Playing Orchestra. Neither of these libraries has legato patches, so I think that is what I'm missing. On the other hand, they say the grass is always greener at the other side of the hill... Anyway, it sounds good enough for now in the mix.

I've added Ardour rather late in the process and normalised the volumes in Qsamler at that point. That meant that I had to re-mix everything, which was very time consuming. Lessons learned:

* Add Ardour to the process from the very beginning, then you don't have to remix things.
* XRuns can cause notes to drop (not just glitches). If there are some notes missing and you can't figure out why, that's probably it.
* It would be great to have sheet music (rather than only a midi recording), that would hopefully make it easier to fix both problems in the composition and problems in the performance.


Acknowledgements
I would like to thank
* rncbc for Qtractor and Qsampler
* The people who created these nice sample libraries: Alexander Holm (for Salamander Grand Piano), Mats Helgesson (for the Maestro Clarinet), the people from Versilian Studios for VSCO CE and Paul Battersby for VPO
* The developers from Calf Studio Gear, LinuxSampler and Ardour
* All my fellow LinuxMusicians, for posting inspiring music and showing just how far one can go making music with the same tools I use

I now see that I made a spelling mistake in the title: I meant "Autumn leafs", not "Autumn is leaving". Let's keep it that way and pretend that it has a poetic meaning ;-)
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Re: Autumn leaves

Post by folderol »

Very nice work, and lots of expression both in levels and timing.
P.S.
'leaves' is the correct spelling! It's one of those plurals with two meanings :lol:
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Re: Autumn leaves

Post by oscillator »

Thank you @PieterPenninckx for this beautiful song and extensive workflow description!

I think you have handled the woodwinds and the brass really well! There is also some great dynamics and a wide spacey mix.

I am working on a "neoclassical" piece myself right now (new to me), so this was extra inspiring!

Thank you for sharing!

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Re: Autumn leaves

Post by jeanette_c »

There is some beautiful orchestral work. Thanks for sharing @PieterPenninckx .
You played the sounds beautifully, you got them to shine, especially the clarinet and the flute. I love how the flute is introduced so subtlely with the piano.
It is a very dry mix. I think I would have preferred a little more reverb, though I get why you kept it so small, emphasizing the intimacy of the piece.
Thanks again Pieter! Feel free to give us more of that. I'm up for it! :)
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Re: Autumn leaves

Post by PieterPenninckx »

folderol wrote: Tue Dec 21, 2021 8:54 am Very nice work, and lots of expression both in levels and timing.
P.S.
'leaves' is the correct spelling! It's one of those plurals with two meanings
Thank you and thanks for correcting my understanding of the English spelling :-)

Concerning the timing: starting from a recording of an improvisation really helps. There are however some parts where it's a little "rushed", so I tried to fix that, but that's not so easy with a recorded improvisation. On other places, I liked the change in tempo and I kept it.
oscillator wrote: Tue Dec 21, 2021 11:59 am I think you have handled the woodwinds and the brass really well! There is also some great dynamics and a wide spacey mix.
Thank you! Actually, I only bothered with the panning of some instruments, the rest is just the default settings. I'm trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. I'm surprised you mention the brass since there isn't a lot of it.
jeanette_c wrote: Tue Dec 21, 2021 1:01 pm You played the sounds beautifully, you got them to shine, especially the clarinet and the flute. I love how the flute is introduced so subtlely with the piano.
It is a very dry mix. I think I would have preferred a little more reverb, though I get why you kept it so small, emphasizing the intimacy of the piece.
Thank you! In fact, I was thinking about giving the flute a more constant volume at that point since I understood that it's not easy to play the flute at various volumes (but flute players, correct me if I'm wrong). I'm glad you like it as it is.
Regarding the mix: yes, it's very dry. That's not really on purpose: I'm just getting my toes wet with reverb. Just like with panning/stereo, I'm figuring out what works and what doesn't. Once I've figured out how and when to use it, you can expect more reverb :-) I think the main reason why I shy away from adding more reverb is because I fear it will smear out everything and make it less clear.
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Re: Autumn leaves

Post by Rainmak3r »

Ouch, looks like I missed this! Really nice piece, which feels like the soundtrack to a French movie :D
I suspect the flute is from VSCO, as I can't find any vibrato/non-vibrato differentiation in the VPO sets (and they sound great in your piece!).
I love the clarinet as well, which is MUCH better than the one in VPO in my opinion: that one seems to have a very slow attack no matter how short you try to keep it (e.g., via mod wheel), and so it never sounds as good as it should when I try it. I'll have to experiment with the one you used too.
On strings, you're right that there's no legato preset in VPO, but you can do something about that by playing with attacks if you use the mod-wheel SFZ: in that case, you can use a MIDI CC (1 or 2, can't recall now) to tell the SFZ engine what kind of attack you want, and that helps smoothing out the harshness of when you play a new note; if you then do some editing to slightly overlap the beginning of a new note with the end of the previous one (typically by anticipating the new note a bit, especially if you're configuring a slower attack), you can get something that sounds more legato-ish. It is a boring process, especially if you wrote a lot of notes, but it can help.
Looking forward to EVEN MORE, now :mrgreen:
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Re: Autumn leaves

Post by forestandgarden »

wow cool, I've not been into orchestral music much lately, but I see things are beginning to move here, in that genre.

Midi note misses in ardour are, ime, not directly xrun related most of the times, #1 cause with me, are note starts that, for one reason or the other, have slipped over the left region boundary (easy to verify by moving said boundary), #2 cause is transport hickups, rewinding a good bit, then playing again, can help, also, midi read ahead does have a separate setting that can be tuned, in the preferences. Xruns, though, can globally indicate that the system is under pressure.

I really like the atmosphere of the piece, the strings alone can make the room grow as a reverb would, and while (at least at a first listen) I'm not (yet) making out a prominent leitmotiv, the recording does transmit a story, does send the listener on an inner journey with no lack of details to discover. What surprised me, were the fanfare-phrased trombones halfway in (1:57 appx), followed by an unison between flute, strings and piano evocative of chinese music - I think it were these unexpected but not incoherent moments that made me broaden my inner movie from pure autumn melancholie, to include 'voyage with exotic elements' :)

I wouldn't worry about the naturality of the flute too much, unlike a recorder, a silver flute has some dynamic range, and a player can further extend it by e.g playing directly towards the audience, or turning sideways. If anything, in a quest for naturality, I'd maybe try to break the very tight coupling between piano and flute, i.e. I'd deliberately randomize the timing a bit, and since the piano, as a kind of leading instrument, is getting a lot of attention and could also benefit from some tasteful randomizations, like e.g. if possible subtly randomizing a parameter that influences tone brightness or sharpness, but ofc. also working with timing, that's maybe a 1st place to experiment with, and the unison passages could gain in humanizing inexactness as a side effect. Worth a try, but maybe too simplistic: pulling the entire piano track a few milliseconds early, as a way to emulate what would probably happen in a real performance situation: the other musicians hanging onto the piano player's interpretation for cues.

Thanks a lot, I enjoyed this, and will enjoy more as I repeat listening
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Re: Autumn leaves

Post by PieterPenninckx »

Rainmak3r wrote: Mon Jan 03, 2022 11:40 am Really nice piece, which feels like the soundtrack to a French movie :D
Thank you! Yes, I think "soundtrack" is the best description of the genre I aim for.
Rainmak3r wrote: Mon Jan 03, 2022 11:40 am On strings, you're right that there's no legato preset in VPO, but you can do something about that by playing with attacks if you use the mod-wheel SFZ: in that case, you can use a MIDI CC (1 or 2, can't recall now) to tell the SFZ engine what kind of attack you want, and that helps smoothing out the harshness of when you play a new note; if you then do some editing to slightly overlap the beginning of a new note with the end of the previous one (typically by anticipating the new note a bit, especially if you're configuring a slower attack), you can get something that sounds more legato-ish. It is a boring process, especially if you wrote a lot of notes, but it can help.
I used that (it's midi CC 1) in combination with midi CC 7 and I have even split up one instrument into different tracks with different channels so that I could edit the midi CC 7 of slightly overlapping notes separately. It's a tedious process indeed, but even with that, I feel like it's not (yet) really what I want. So ... yeah.
Rainmak3r wrote: Mon Jan 03, 2022 11:40 am Looking forward to EVEN MORE, now :mrgreen:
Thank you! I think I'll take a break from orchestral now and try some more sound-designish things. On the other hand, I'm also revisiting my "classical" workflow to shift more to the old-school "pen and paper" method. So ... we'll see what the future brings...
forestandgarden wrote: Thu Jan 06, 2022 8:27 pm wow cool, I've not been into orchestral music much lately, but I see things are beginning to move here, in that genre.
You have to thank @Rainmak3r for that. His The Wind and the Lake has encouraged me to try with the tools that we have available.
forestandgarden wrote: Thu Jan 06, 2022 8:27 pm Midi note misses in ardour are, ime, not directly xrun related most of the times, [...] Xruns, though, can globally indicate that the system is under pressure.
You have a point. Reading what you've posted, I now think that at certain points in the piece, the computer is under pressure causing 1) xruns and 2) LinuxSampler to drop some notes.
forestandgarden wrote: Thu Jan 06, 2022 8:27 pm What surprised me, were the fanfare-phrased trombones halfway in (1:57 appx), followed by an unison between flute, strings and piano evocative of chinese music - I think it were these unexpected but not incoherent moments that made me broaden my inner movie from pure autumn melancholie, to include 'voyage with exotic elements'
Thank you! One of the advantages of an improvisation-based approach is that it tends to be coherent, even when there are surprising twists.
forestandgarden wrote: Thu Jan 06, 2022 8:27 pm I wouldn't worry about the naturality of the flute too much, unlike a recorder, a silver flute has some dynamic range, and a player can further extend it by e.g playing directly towards the audience, or turning sideways.
Ah, thanks for clarifying. Yes, my experience with the recorder is that it has almost no dynamic range. Good to know that the silver flute has more dynamic range.
forestandgarden wrote: Thu Jan 06, 2022 8:27 pm If anything, in a quest for naturality, I'd maybe try to break the very tight coupling between piano and flute, i.e. I'd deliberately randomize the timing a bit
Spot on, thanks for pointing that out. The piano part is a recording of an improvisation, without quantization and hence naturally randomized. But the flute is a copy+paste of that, hence in perfect sync. My preferred solution would be to do a separate (midi) recording of the flute part. I've done that in a previous piece and I think that would have made it more lively, as if it's really two instruments instead of one. I'll try to think about it next time.
forestandgarden wrote: Thu Jan 06, 2022 8:27 pm Thanks a lot, I enjoyed this, and will enjoy more as I repeat listening
Thank you for the in-depth review!
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Re: Autumn leaves

Post by Rainmak3r »

PieterPenninckx wrote: Sat Jan 08, 2022 11:18 am
forestandgarden wrote: Thu Jan 06, 2022 8:27 pm Midi note misses in ardour are, ime, not directly xrun related most of the times, [...] Xruns, though, can globally indicate that the system is under pressure.
You have a point. Reading what you've posted, I now think that at certain points in the piece, the computer is under pressure causing 1) xruns and 2) LinuxSampler to drop some notes.
I personally found LinuxSampler to be a resource hog. The very first fully orchestral piece I wrote was a waltz, and all VPO instruments used LinuxSampler: I couldn't even get Ardour to export the track without crashing, and in fact I had to do it more than once to get the full exported audio out eventually. I'd look into sfizz instead, which is a much lighter SFZ implementation for linux (even though it's not without its own issues).
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Re: Autumn leaves

Post by milo »

Late again, but catching up. This piece deserves a standing ovation and demands for an encore! You are making some really nice music, and I expect that your recording will only get better as you get more experience and comfort with the tools. Everything else I was going to say was covered in the previous comments in this thread.
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Re: Autumn leaves

Post by PieterPenninckx »

Rainmak3r wrote: Sat Jan 08, 2022 11:45 am I'd look into sfizz instead, which is a much lighter SFZ implementation for linux (even though it's not without its own issues).
Thanks for this suggestion. You've already suggested this before, but this time, I've upgraded sfizz to version 1.2 and now the CC events work :D . I haven't checked the sustain pedal yet, but you can expect the next piece to be made with sfizz!
milo wrote: Sat Jan 22, 2022 6:43 pm Late again, but catching up. This piece deserves a standing ovation and demands for an encore! You are making some really nice music, and I expect that your recording will only get better as you get more experience and comfort with the tools.
No reason to apologize. Getting this feedback from you really means a lot since your work shows that you know a lot about making music.
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Re: Autumn leaves

Post by folderol »

I must be getting ol^H^Hmiddle aged. This poped up and I thought hey this is good, must comment... Then, hmmm this seems familiar. Oh! I already commented!
Oh well, it's just as good the second time around.
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Re: Autumn leaves

Post by glowrak guy »

Rainmak3r wrote: Sat Jan 08, 2022 11:45 am
PieterPenninckx wrote: Sat Jan 08, 2022 11:18 am
forestandgarden wrote: Thu Jan 06, 2022 8:27 pm Midi note misses in ardour are, ime, not directly xrun related most of the times, [...] Xruns, though, can globally indicate that the system is under pressure.
You have a point. Reading what you've posted, I now think that at certain points in the piece, the computer is under pressure causing 1) xruns and 2) LinuxSampler to drop some notes.
I personally found LinuxSampler to be a resource hog. The very first fully orchestral piece I wrote was a waltz, and all VPO instruments used LinuxSampler: I couldn't even get Ardour to export the track without crashing, and in fact I had to do it more than once to get the full exported audio out eventually. I'd look into sfizz instead, which is a much lighter SFZ implementation for linux (even though it's not without its own issues).
Hi, have you tried recording the linuxsampler or ardour output to the timemachine recorder? It's 24 bit .w64
so pretty high quality. While not instant, a side effect is that it gives my ears a break, while making
pastries an endangered species. Rick Beato says such breaks really help the ears to properly process the mixes being worked on.
I set a timer for long pieces, so I can get a seat for pressing the OFF button.
Cheers
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