Farewell to Nova Scotia redux

• Mar 10, 2017 - 19:45

Four years after my first attempt at scoring for full orchestra with Musescore, the Farewell to Nova Scotia, I decided to return to the work and see how it sounded with the external orchestra I spent the intervening years setting up, the one that was used for my Symphony in D minor . The result is staggeringly better. Clamp on a good pair of headphones and have a listen at //youtu.be/6bceV7P-FKo . (For comparison, the original “straight out of Musescore” version is at //youtu.be/2Rapzvzp2AM .)

Bear in mind as you’re listening that the score you see is playing “live”; this is exactly what the orchestra sounds like when I'm working on a score. There's no post-production, although there is a certain amount of Musescore trickery going on in the form of hidden notes and articulations, multiple channels per staff, and individually tweaked note velocities and dynamics.

For whatever it's worth, I'm currently writing a paper—small book, actually—on Linux midi orchestration with Musescore as the front end. Sadly, as I’m writing, I’m coming to the conclusion that the weakest link in the midi/audio chain is Musescore itself. It cannot swell through held notes and there’s no way to fake it. It does not permit changing note off-times (from the score itself, where it needs to be done), making the control of articulations and realistic phrasing next-to-impossible.

It is such a shame to get this close to what is essentially a score driven DAW only to have the midi versions of one’s scores hobbled by these limitations in the front end.


Comments

"For whatever it's worth..."

I would be very interested in such a paper/book - but for me it would be helpful you could recommend software beside kx-studio (as Linux but not Ubuntu/Debian-User).

In reply to by kuwitt

The paper I'm writing necessarily relies on KXStudio tools. It's not a discussion of possible ways to implement an external sampled orchestra for use with MuseScore, but rather a look at the only way to do it satisfactorily and reliably.

Non Debian/Ubuntu users can download pre-built binaries of the necessary tools directly from KXStudio, so the reliance on them isn't a stumbling block if you're running something other than Debian/Ubuntu.

At any rate, the paper won't be online for at least a month or two.

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