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16 bars of piano with just 1 midiclip

Author RobertoD
Profile picture for user RobertoD

Hi.

I imported in Synfire the first bar (omitting the grace note) of Robert Schumann's Arabeske op.18 via midifile

and built on that seven-notes excerpt a 16-measures piano phrase. I simply reversed the upper part and changed harmony. Then, to humanize it I added two templates shipped with Synfire:

  1. to the parameter Shift I added a Soft humanizer, for a lesser robotic playing
  2. to the parameter Velocity, the random 4-parts Soft Deviation template was added, to emulate the imperfections of the human touch.

What you can hear from the attached mp3 is at 99% what came out from Synfire, except for bar 13 and bar 16.

Actually, bar 13 was already good sounding as it was rendered by Synfire. I manipulated it only as a post-production exercise to make it more easily playable by a real-world pianist (Synfire is a prototyping software, some adjustments will likely be always necessary):

Bar 16 is an elementary cadence and was added apart to complete the piece:

 

duequarti.mp3
Attachments
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duequarti.mp3

Comments

Profile picture for user RobertoD
RobertoD
Sat, 2017-12-02 - 14:13 Permalink

Synfire to me seems a software that will do more and more better with music of increasing complexity. This does not mean that it can not fit well with a simple melodic song. Just that one should notice more the real time savings about on complex tracks. My opinion.

Profile picture for user andre
andre
Mon, 2017-12-04 - 23:42 Permalink

A great example that demonstrates how to turn simple, short figures into evolving music by simple transformation and change of harmonic context. Thanks for sharing it. 

Actually, most music doesn't need much more effort that this, plus instrumentation and arrangement. We all tend to think of music as a super complex thing, where actually the ideas behind it are simple. It's merely the rendering of notes that make it look complex (and sometimes make it hard to play).

I played around with your example by applying different groupings to the figure segments. Never actually thought of using this as yet another way to add variation. I'm stunned by the fact that, after all the years, I still discover new things with Synfire.