# New original, "Wayward March"



## Alex Temple (Sep 1, 2010)

Hi everyone,

It's been a little while since I've posted anything, so here's a short piece I've been working on. After trimming around 7 minutes of music that didn't really fit, I think it's presentable. 

It's scored for orchestra, or an "orchestral big band" in this case since there's so much emphasis on the brass. Pretty different from anything I've posted before. One of my goals with this piece was to have most musical elements be very obvious, and since some of my recent work has gotten pretty complicated I wanted to do something simpler. From the bass lines to the melodies to the orchestration, this isn't really a subtle piece. The word "march" in the title isn't referring to a musical form or anything - in this case it represents more of a leering, drunken stumble.

I've added The Trumpet and Hollywoodwinds to my arsenal, and both are featured prominently in this piece (SAM and VSL that make up the rest of the instruments). There are also Westgate horns here and there but I still haven't gotten them to sit quite right.

Here's the link: http://www.box.net/shared/uuj9jv3kng

Comments and critiques welcome!


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## Guy Bacos (Sep 1, 2010)

Alex, you are so gifted! It's a real treat to hear music of this quality done with samples. The texture is heavier on the brass and you made it work so well, probably the best I've heard brass used for a thick texture like that. I love the forward motion of the composition. I could keep on saying positive things about it but to keep it short it's fantastic and ranks among the best virtual pieces I've heard. I also appreciate that you don't go for any commercial tricks or clichés but rather use your craft artistically to make good original music. A true talent you are!


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## sherief83 (Sep 1, 2010)

Alex,
I am Blown away deeply to shame. You sir have got to have the most realistic mock ups I've ever heard. 

Was the woodwinds used were phrases(fx) or real patches? especially for runs? Just curios. In fact was there any other phrases used in this work or all real legato patches?

I already can see your name up there with hollywood's A list. its only a matter of time.


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## mverta (Sep 2, 2010)

Had to post just because that brass kicks so much total ass. Best brass I've heard, by far. 

You must be using a different The Trumpet than I am, because mine as sure as shit doesn't sound like that, in any context. 

Anyway, well done on the mock-up... the bar's been set.

_Mike


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## germancomponist (Sep 2, 2010)

Yes, I agree with what the others said.

Well done, Alex!


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## dfhagai (Sep 2, 2010)

Amazing music mathced with an excellent mockup.
Admiration, is all I can say.


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## rgames (Sep 2, 2010)

Agree the mockup sounds fantastic, especially the brass.

Only comment on the music is that maybe the main rhythmic motif was overused a bit. Otherwise very nice!

rgames


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## Alex Temple (Sep 2, 2010)

Guy: Thank you for your compliments, it means a lot coming from you! 

Sherief: I used Hollywoodwinds for a few runs and rips here and there, but mostly I used them for the octave patches. These work so well when you want that sheen from unison and octave winds over brass or string parts but don't want them to stick out in the mix too much, which was always happening to me when I tried using individual wind instruments to build these textures. Fortunately they blend pretty well with the VSL winds, so when I need the winds to take a more central role the switch to the VSL solo instruments is pretty smooth. Thanks for listening!

Mike: Thanks! It's really encouraging to get such good responses about the brass mix, since I was also using this piece to "calibrate" my new template. Before now I always shied away from writing trumpet parts and often gave them to the horns, but The Trumpet is capable of sounding so good I don't need to do that any more. One thing that helped was to give the third trumpet a completely different Altiverb hall impulse from the first two, which share a dedicated Todd-AO impulse. It sounds a little weird when the third plays solo lines against the other two but it makes a thicker texture on unisons with less phasing.

germancomponist, dfhagai: Thanks for you comments!

rgames: I agree with you about the rhythms, and if I were to to any more work on this that would be one of things I would address. Some of the music I deleted moved into both a 3/4 scherzo passage and a 9/8 "Sorcerer's Apprentice"-type passage, but I couldn't make them fit without reorganizing the whole form into a more serious piece of music, which it isn't really supposed to be. Thanks for listening!


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## synergy543 (Sep 2, 2010)

Really top-notch composition, orchestration and performance Alex. I love the contrasting elements in your arrangement - how you let all the different voices "speak".

Sweet....you deserve "The Mask". :mrgreen:


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## Lunatique (Sep 3, 2010)

What I like about this is it's got a very thick sound but everything is still articulate and clear, as well as never becoming synthy, which is all too often what happens with samples. Great stuff!


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## Aaron Sapp (Sep 3, 2010)

Outstanding as always, Alex!


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## tslesicki (Sep 3, 2010)

Great stuff! A very pleasing listen!


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## Hannes_F (Sep 3, 2010)

Very well done sir!


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## rabiang (Sep 3, 2010)

i am starting to understand that the underlying aesthetic valuation on this forum is orchestral likeness. as such, its very good. 

when you start a song with a bang, why dont you do it on more instruments? i tried hard to find something you might improve on and thats about it. uniqueness maybe, but i am not sure that is a valued commodity .


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## George Caplan (Sep 3, 2010)

great piece and sound.


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## JBacal (Sep 4, 2010)

Wow!! Superb writing and unsurpassed sample performance and mix! Wow!

Best wishes and keep 'em coming,
Jay


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## rayinstirling (Sep 5, 2010)

Alex

I love everything about it and have downloaded it for many future listens, something I rarely do. It's a yardstick for a place I'll never get to.

Thanks for sharing.

Ray


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## Rob (Sep 5, 2010)

Though I'm not a fan of this kind of syncopation in orchestral music, this piece is so well written and performed that my personal taste becomes irrelevant... it's a remarkable accomplishment indeed!


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## dfhagai (Sep 5, 2010)

Alex, can you write a little about your workflow?
How do you go on composing and producing such an impressive piece?


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## Alex Temple (Sep 7, 2010)

Thanks for the comments, everyone! 

dfhagai: For my compositional workflow, my writing is always best when I compose in Sibelius first and then orchestrate as I sequence the individual parts in Sonar. Being able to link Sibelius and Sonar via ReWire is making this a pretty smooth process, though with as dense a piece as this it's still straining the CPU too much to be useful. I try to avoid composing straight into Sonar because it always leads to my paying too much attention to details while losing sight of the overall piece. I still do this a lot - about half of this piece was composed this way. The exception to this is definitely percussion, which I'd rather do straight to samples. 

As far as the programming and mixing, I think the biggest part of the workflow is having a meticulously "well-tuned" template that takes all the results of hours of experimenting and tweaking and puts them together so that you never have to worry about them again. By this I mean that all instrument levels are already set, and that reverb settings sound good but aren't so demanding that they bog down the CPU. Equally important is that, within the allowances of RAM, all the samples you are likely to need are already available, and that you have a consistent way of accessing them across all instruments. This is the first piece I've composed since putting together a computer fast enough to do all of this, and I probably spent four days just assembling the template (time well spent since I won't need to do it again for a while). Usually by the time I finish a piece, I've had to adjust various instrument levels to be more accurate. I'll erase all the MIDI data and update the old template to include these changes to make a new, slightly more refined template. The best part about all this is that since 95% of the template is loaded into VE Pro when I boot up the computer, I can go back and forth among many projects without having any of them take more than 20 seconds to load. 8)


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## Frederick Russ (Sep 7, 2010)

Great work Alex!


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## dfhagai (Sep 8, 2010)

Thanks for your detailed reply Alex.

Let me see If I got it straight ,when you say:
"I compose in Sibelius first and then orchestrate as I sequence the individual parts in Sonar"

Do you mean you compose the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements into Sibelius, 
If so, what sounds do you use for your composition? only piano? 
and then you stream the MIDI via rewire into sonar, orchestrate and polish?

Hope I don't disturber you with my questions, I'm just astonished at your achievements.

I really like the idea of having Sibelius rewired to the sequencer,
Sounds more musical then working in front of the grid.
I will definitely try that.


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## impressions (Sep 8, 2010)

i think sibelius can be wired to east west..
and wow alex, your age is also even more amazing. really the most convincing mock up of brass i heard, should be on their demos and give them a hard time before selling it


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## Alex Temple (Sep 8, 2010)

dfhagai: That's pretty much it, and I usually stick with piano sounds unless I'm writing something slow or something with very instrument-specific harmonies - a good example would be dissonances in brass parts, which rarely sound right on the piano. In that case I'll usually do it in Sonar with the actual sounds. Also, if during the composition process there's a specific musical statement that I consider vital to the piece I'll sequence it completely, just to make sure samples can pull it off. 

Linking Sibelius and Sonar gives complete freedom in going back and forth between the score and the music in any way I want. The only catch is that the version of ReWire used by Sibelius and Sonar doesn't actually stream any MIDI, it just synchronizes the playback between the two programs. It's still very helpful though, since I find Sonar's notation editor unusable (I don't think it's been updated in at least 10 years). So in Sonar, I do my programming with a combination of manual note entry, step-input and live input at the piano roll view.


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## JaredJn (Nov 20, 2011)

.... Holy Crap .... 

Looks like I have some major work to do after hearing this piece 5 times...

I have nothing else to say haha!!


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## Saxer (Nov 21, 2011)

wow, really great stuff... and it really has this original feeling of a classical orchestra playing syncopes :D T*u*mmTaTaTa*aA*Aa


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