A Personal Orchestra: A digital sounds library

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By now everyone knows that I tinker with a certain musical notation program pretty frequently; it is called Finale Printmusic.  The family of software products is called Finale; the top of the line program is also called Finale, and costs around $600.  Printmusic, a middle-level product without many of the deluxe features of the top of the line program, costs around $100.

Many of the musical examples I supply you require me to enter the music note by note into the program, which is essentially an editor.  However, in analogy with text editors which will actually read your text back to you (not an uncommon feature these days), Printmusic plays the music back for you.  You can adjust the sounds it uses: e.g. Grand Piano, or Solo Violin, or whatever, for each line of music.  (The music consists of multiple lines.)  Obviously, therefore, the program is sold with an entire sheaf of music sounds already built in.

I have to say at the outset that the sounds provided with the program are really excellent, though they vary in quality from year to year, as I upgrade the program.  Is it just me, or is the sound set for 2009 particularly excellent?  I don't know.

This brings me to the main piece of information for today.  Another program that is in the same family as my music notation program is a sound library.  It is a very basic subset of this library that is packaged into Printmusic, to provide the sounds.  The full library consists of actual sound samples from an enormous variety of instruments, ranging from solo flutes to entire Viola sections, consisting of some 6 violas playing together.  Once you buy their library of sounds, you can connect this system to a number of programs you might have, such as my notation program, or even the Music Animation Program which I use to provide a visual accompaniment to some of the music clips I have supplied in the past.

Of course, when I received an offer (as a user of Printmusic) of one of the libraries for a mere $160, I was tempted beyond bearing.  So last week, I became a proud owner of the so called Garritan Personal Orchestra.  The on-line information, of course, can hardly give one a complete idea of what you're getting, so in some ways this was a leap in the dark.  But, honestly, it is very difficult for them to give a potential buyer a more complete idea of what the package contains without actually giving away some of the sounds they're trying to sell.  In one sense it is a very vulnerable position for a company to be in.

In any case, we talked it over, and decided to go for it.  My wife knows how much I enjoy working with this sort of thing, so pretty soon I was downloading it (almost a gigabyte of data, including sound files of all sorts).  They also provide a player that will play MIDI files.  (MIDI is a number of things: a standard, but most important, a file format.  It is a way of storing music digitally, so that it can be played back.  Unlike an mp3 file, which actually stores the sounds, MIDI stores the list of notes in the proper order; when it is played back, you have to use your own sounds, or at least use the standard low-budget sounds that Microsoft provides with your computer.  The MIDI file only tells you which sounds are needed, but does not give you the sounds.  It is essentially like a piano roll.)

As it turned out, it was by no means trivial to hook up the sound library to my music software.  So far, the only satisfaction I have been able to get out of the thing is to (1) make MIDI files from my old notation program, Printmusic, and (2) play the MIDI files through the MIDI player that came with the sound library, called Aria.

The Aria program has been designed to look more or less like the old-time synthesizers that were built by Robert Moog and others.  Today, unlike back then, the sound is generated from computer circuits, rather than electronic hardware.  In fact, Aria is more like a fancy mp3 player that switches in little clips from a vast number of mp3 files that consist of single notes.  In other words, it is sampling, or at least audio sampling, a close relative to what the hip-hop and techno people do.

You will probably be bored with some of the first attempts I made to "orchestrate" the MIDI files I had made.  Here is one of the first ones I succeeded in making sound pretty good.  I is one of my own compositions ---in fact the only halfway decent piece I have composed in the last twenty years--- which is still making do with the makeshift name of Serenade.This first video (it's just a clip of music; the video is just window-dressing), made with my old system, using nothing but Printmusic:



Now, here is the same piece, made with the sounds from the Garritan Personal Orchestra.  Unfortunately, I enjoyed the string sounds so much that I used strings, instead of the woodwind quartet in the previous video.




I hope to make a version of the piece using Garritan, and a wind ensemble.  Actually, it is ready; I have to make a video out of it.  Then I have to put it on YouTube, because the video features on Blogger are rather primitive.

What do you think of the sound from Garritan?  They've always been good, from what I understand, but evidently this most recent version of their sound library is exceptionally good for the price.

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