Updated Fri 21 Feb 2020
Orchestral Study #3 (adagio with melisma), updated audio and original audio
I hear the separation of instruments more clearly with the HALion Sonic sounds than with Musescore. This is probably the result of a combination of higher quality sounds and better conversion to MP3, and no doubt lossless would increase that quality further. The Musescore output often blurred the separate instruments together and would have required me to export each one, import into a DAW, and then mix them together. Even with that effort, the canned MIDI sounds would still leave horns sounding like an organ and strings too mushy. Dorico (though more basic that a DAW) handles all of that.
There are two characteristics I started noticing with this 3rd study. First, the orchestrations sounds much thinner once the artificial haze of bad MIDI is reduced. The clarity of each part removes aural artifacts from the space in between each instrument. What I thought was a “big” sound is… really not that big.
Second, and this may be more evident after immersing myself in the stark modernism of New Complexity pieces, my early studies are more tonal than I remember them being. I never wanted to create completely atonal or tonal works, but rather to discover some combination or hybrid that is personally expressive, and so I don’t stop myself from pandiatonic passages. These first works–struggling with an orchestra–are less ambitious in that regard.
So far with these updates, I’m only adding dynamics and what expressions can be added using Dorico’s sound editor and mixer. In a few places I’ve re-written phrases that are out of range for the instrument, but i don’t want to re-write. These are what they are, and I need to move on.
Hoping to finish in a month or so and continue composing.