A few months ago I celebrated my birthday. Nothing new. Happens every year. But as you get older, you begin to consciously realize that time is running out and if you’re going to write the musical equivalent of the Great American Novel, now would be an awfully good time to start.

I’m finding myself growing more and more irritated with music technology and the kinds of system integration issues that draw you away from the real task at hand.

Recently, I committed a heresy and I enjoyed it so much, I might do it again. I wrote a score without listening to one single sample. It was a great delight not having my imagination directed by something almost but not quite though semi-real.

I’m under contract now for library music. Coming out of advertising before going back to music full time, I thought I’d create a series of 30-second string pads in each of the modes. When you’re writing for nothing specific you can write specific things like that. I created my first pad, and to my dismay, the string library I was using sounded terrible. OK, I sounded terrible.

So I thought, “Dvorak doesn’t sound terrible.” So I pulled out six bars for strings and solo flute from the New World Symphony with Herbert von Karajan conducting. Big string sound. Beautiful flute solo, even if I listened to it on YouTube.

I recreated what Dvorak wrote, and Dvorak sounded as bad as me!

Well that can’t be right.

So I sent the example to a friend who had the same sample library and who was also on Logic and who knew that Dvorak wasn’t a horse in the 5th at Pimlico.

And he got the exact same results after sequencing it himself from scratch!

I tried three different libraries and it came back sounding like Chorale in Dorian For Accordion. In disgust, I put it away and wrote four songs.

Finally after a mental break I tried again last night with a different recording technique, and at last, progress. I have one more test to do tomorrow, and God willing, I’ll be able to write music instead of writing for samples that have difficulty with the most basic vertical 4- and 5- part voicings.

How much I could have written without all that fal-da-rah!

Oh well, if all works well, I should have a strong session tomorrow which means breakthrough and that I can get on with instead of screwing around doing someone elses homework.

This is a good thing. But it’s also why I’m cantankerous about time. My time is best spent writing and orchestrating. That’s how I build my literary estate and make the money I need to buy the stuff that should work for me the first time out of the box.

In a way, it’s why I wish there were more dumb libraries. Let me give you an example. Recently we began representing Sonokinetic out of the Netherlands. They have a great sounding library called Spinet 1790 which is a simply beautiful sounding keyboard that doesn’t have 4,623 engineering options that I’ll never get to in three lifetimes. Instead, you load it, and you play it, and it sounds just lovely.

What a concept! Just play it.

More libraries like that and, “really, for sure,” I wouldn’t be so cantankerous!

Don’t get me wrong. It’s important to have good features. But they need to be good musical features and there needs to be the documentation from the company that’s clear and gets you going quickly so that you’re being musically productive as early as possible.

That is what music technology needs more of.

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