Composition Challenge #6 - Voting

hobbio

I'm not much good at giving feedback, but here goes:

1st - 5 points - @SteamAbacus - Very airy and spacious, and lots for the ear to latch onto. The lead tone is wonderful, and I liked the way you mixed in some quite technical passages with more textural sounds. Played effortlessly, too.

2nd - 3 points - @Fretwired - Very similar in feel and style to my first place choice, with almost eerie keyboard(?) textures. Loved it, and it was hard to choose between this and SteamAbacus. 

3rd - 1 point - @samzadgan - Epic mate! Some really great stuff in there, monster tone and great feel. As others have said, and you acknowledge, it was missing the rest of the band somewhat but family comes first!

Well done to everyone else who entered, I enjoyed listening to each and every piece

Fretwired

Thanks for your votes folks .. means a lot.

@hobbio glad you liked the keyboards .. a couple of VSTs that come as standard with Cubase - rock organ is self explanatory I think. I played a simple chord sequence Emin/Emin/A7/A7/Emin/Emin/A7/A7/C/Bmin7/F/G/D7 and then put down a bass line using a Squire bass into a free bass amp sim that came with Computer Music magazine and a Fender Strat with Kinman pickups into a HiWatt amp sim on my Line 6 POD. Just pentatonics from the Dmajor, Gmajor and Cmajor scales.

The drums were interesting .. played by a guy called Nick Mason from a band called The Pink Floyd. It was great having him on board .. :-)

Antique_Guitars

Finally listened to them all and they are all really great!

For me the top three are:

Nomad - 5 points

Fretwired - 3 points

Thecolourbox - 1 point

Rock and roll

Fretwired

Thanks @Antique_Guitars ..

Antique_Guitars

last day to vote today

Bellycaster

5 Points - Nomad

3 Points - TheColourBox

1 Point - Steamabacus

Nomad

Aye, not an easy challenge. Quite difficult to strike the balance between addressing the subject at hand, and still presenting an idea musically.

Here are my votes...

5 pts - @steamabacus

Excellent interpretation of the idea of pushing through the mud. I liked the sounds of battle coming in towards the end, and the breathing of the exhausted protagonist (the listener!) was a great touch. Damn good tune, too.

3 pts - @thecolourbox

Marching drums, disjointed, somewhat discordant, and that bugle(?) tune that I can't remember the name of near the end throwing a wobbly. Made me think of a soldier's bad dream, or maybe a soundtrack for a video sequence of the same.

1 pt - @TTony

A relentless focus on the rank stench of those bodies haunting still. Makes me think of the thousand yard stare of a shell-shocked soldier.

Here are some notes about mine...

Equipment...
PC running Windows 7.
Cakewalk Sonar X3 Studio
EWQL Symphonic Choirs
M-Audio 2496 sound/MIDI card
Hammond GM-1000 hardware sound module
Behringer Xenix 1622 mixer

I actually started writing this just before I read about the challenge. I had decided to mess around with a choir sound with no firm idea in mind, and had come up with the descending female vocal intro before taking a few minutes out for a browse of the forum. I read about the challenge, and reckoned the putative choir idea might be suitable. The rest of the piece was written with the challenge specifically in mind.

The piece consists of 3 MIDI tracks - female choir, male choir, and a low pad. Most of the female vocal line was written first, and then the male vocal was added, coming in after the initial female phrase. I then added the pad sound and worked up the latter half of the tune (which was still a bit uncertain apart from the outro) by fiddling around with the notes until I felt it sounded right. I have no idea what the chords are that the three parts make up (or even what key it's in), but I was aiming for something that shifted around, feeling slightly tense or unsettling at times, but still conveying the repose of someone who has passed.

The choir sounds started out as voices in the GM-1000 sound module, but were switched over to Symphonic Choirs (which was bought after I had started working on the piece). The pad stayed as a GM-1000 sound. The tracks were converted to digital audio files, recorded dry, and EQ and reverb were added during mixing, using VSTs in Sonar.

Antique_Guitars

@Nomad yours was truly inspiring to me, I really want to start writing choral stuff now!

spark240

1st = Nomad

2nd = Fretwired

3rd = SteamAbacus

Antique_Guitars

Voting now closed

Nomad

Antique_Guitars said:

@Nomad yours was truly inspiring to me, I really want to start writing choral stuff now!

Thanks. I didn't start out doing stuff with choirs. When I first got into MIDI, the plan was to write backing tracks for playing rock guitar to, but when I realised that I could bung in some notes, and then cycle through the available sounds, things went off at a complete tangent. I've settled to a palette of about 20 instruments in total, selecting the ones I want for a particular piece. Choirs feature quite often, or at least small vocal ensembles. Sometimes, they back other instruments, sometimes they're the main feature.

Symphonic Choirs is pricey (and huge), but is well worth it. I reckon that and one or two other packages are about as far as you can go before hiring an actual choir and recording space (or doing some clever multi-tracking if you can sing the parts).

Having recently got it, I've been reworking the existing tunes to use the new voices - it'll take quite a while to redo the mixes, and I need to be careful with the choice of sounds because there are subtle bits that worked partly due to the particular voices that were originally used. I don't want to lose sight of those aspects.