Originally Posted By: MarioD
Mark this is excellent. Your experiment was a success! FWIW - I would go back to just the guitar and recorder, i.e. no percussion. Then I would add a touch of reverb on the guitar and if there are layers on the guitar lower the velocity. I would also put some reverb and delay on the recorder. Please understand this is not criticism, I really like the song, I'm just explaining how I would produce a song like this one. YMMV


Thank you so much! And criticism is good! At least, I take yours for goodness, and can hopefully reply goodly and produce goodness in return. I am very appreciative that you take the time to comment thoughtfully on this project of mine.

The percussion was just a marker, for my own convenience as much as anything, so I could tell where the transforms start and end. I should just leave it out. There's another marker, anyway – the pitches rotate around C, and the theme begins and ends with C, so I use long held Cs to bridge one part to the next.

I agree, the guitar could be much better. At least now it sounds like a real guitar being played badly by a human. But again, to keep with the idea of the piece, I wouldn't want to make changes to anything except the "prime" transform, so any changes would have to work for ALL 4 VARIATIONS. Or I could make a change to part 2, or part 3, or part 4, but then I'd have to propagate it to part 1 and the others.

As it is, the piece evolves from normal to weird (inverted) to very weird (retrograde inverted) to weirdly familar (reversed) then back to normal. I'd like to have those weird sections be good music, not just what happened to result.

Man, if I could get this to the point where I was totally happy with all 4 sections, without breaking the no-independent-changes rule, that would be a nifty musical accomplishment. And then I get to master it!

(Good luck with your own flute/guitar thing...)