Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: April 02 2004, 10:54 |
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I don't personally see any difference between laying down notes in a sequencer and writing them on paper (well ok, of course there's a difference, but at the end of the day, the same information is being recorded, just in a different way), and writing compositions down on paper never harmed any of the master composers of the past.
I can't honestly see any reason why taking note of good musical ideas is cheating creativity, although I suppose you could claim that there's more creativity involved in making up a new tune because you've forgotten the one you came up with the day before...
There's also a problem, when working with improvisations of a length of the one presented here, which is that it's possible to get so absorbed in it that by the end, half of the good bits have been forgotten. So record it, you say...I would agree with that. But let me ask, is there a difference between recording a performance as audio and recording it into a sequencer (not technically speaking)? I'd not say there is really, they both give you a record of the notes, neither of which are your final performance (though they both could be if you wanted to go that way). The sequence offers an advantage, though - if you want to take musical ideas from it, there's no need to work out what you played and transcribe it, it's already there. You can pull your favourite parts out and put them straight into the final composition, where they can of course be reworked further. They can then be printed off as sheet music and played, or they can be played through a sound source to provide an audio guide, for people who work by ear...or they can be run straight through a sound source to produce a final recording. Which is best depends entirely on the end result the composer is after.
I use a combination of methods myself, sometimes working things over in my head before writing them on paper, sometimes feeding them into a sequencer and working on them in there, and sometimes playing around on an instrument until the right thing emerges. I can't really say that any method seems more 'creative' to me, or that one takes more talent than any of the rest (though I think it could be successfully argued that using several methods demands more ability than sticking to one). None necessarily has any bearing on the end result - I might take a sequence and play the notes by hand on an acoustic instrument, or I might take something that's come out of experimenting on an instrument and turn it into a sequence (though actually, if I'm fairly sure of what I want, I tend to bypass the sequencing stage and play things straight to audio instead).
I should comment on the music while I'm here! There's certainly some interesting stuff in there, and it does come across as being listenable. Certainly worth plundering for ideas...
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While I like it myself, I don't have a clue wether it's actually good or bad or whatever. I don't really have contacts with other piano playing people, you see. So I wonder: is it listenable nonetheless?
