Happy Birthday, ferrie!
I hear we had some classical music adaptions already, so nothing much new here. Also, I did not complete all of the work within our intentionally restricted time to accomplish a task. Nevertheless I thought this is the perfect opportunity to tell you the story of the piece of music that I uploaded as a contribution to this weekâs junto. In several regards, it fulfils the assignment of âuse a new musical thing to recreate some old musical thingâ.
So here it goes:
One day, I found an old box of old sheet notes on the flea market and so I bought a folder with a full set of orchestra sheet notes from a piece called âSmetanaâs Legacyâ (tranlsated). I wondered what it would sound like back when this piece was performed. So I decided to use more or less modern equipment to make it play again.
At first I wrote the notes by hand into the piano roll of the DAW. That was crazy and soon I became bored with it. Itâs like several million single notes, as it felt like. Therefore I scanned all the notes into image files and used a program to translate the scanned sheet notes into midi notes. This did not work perfectly but good enough to more or less quickly have most of the notes translated. Then I needed to check all the notes by hand for errors and determine the dynamics for all notes, which of cours were not translated. I had to learn how to do different time signatures and tempo automation in the DAW. The next step was to choose instruments that play each voice. That was the hardest part, because there are so many notes playing at the same time, itâs not possible to fit synth patches that were designed to sound full and rich on their own, in layers on top of each other. Therefore I used the simplest 3xOSC synth with single cycle waveforms for each instrument. That would fit and I realized that an orchestra is an additive synthesizer and the composers had to write the layered notes for each instrument so that in the end one, letâs say, âbody of timbre that changes over timeâ, is created. huge respect!
This project was quite some work but also fun, and I did not do it within these 3 days of the junto, but because it is kind of useless to listen to, only to hear the result if you know the story of it, I thought this is the perfect occassion to publish this song.
The track still contains some errors I think, but I donât want to go to the notes again and check them. That way, it is kind of not all automatic midi instrumentation.
For this junto contribution, I still revisited the song and modified the instruments by placing them at different position on a virtual stage by using impulse responses from different positions on a stage at a concert hall.
I donât really like the beginning of the song, but I do love the moldau 
and if you are interested, this is what the notes looked like before
and in the DAW.
