PG Music Home Forums General Discussion User Showcase Moonlight On The Bay

Thanks, Marty ~ and a big yes to really enjoying composing in BiaB, though it's more often than not hard work. My process is usually this: I have an idea which I want to explore, then I experiment with chord structures before finding something that I think will work, though occasionally I'll end up with something completely different to the original idea. To test the chord structures I usually use only 2 Styles for playback, then once I think I've got what I want I start collecting samples, first starting with close to 200 Styles I have saved as 'favourites', plus I'll also use the "Choose Styles similar to current". I'll next take individual instrument samples from the chosen Styles and I rarely end up with less than 50, often 30+ of them being solos, then it’s a very long process of trying them out in Audacity and rejecting those that fit the least well. Regarding the solos, I'm surprised that the original generation is often a lot better than following regenerations, though I'll sometimes have to cut and paste passages or phrases from different regenerations to get a solo I really like. When next orchestrating the samples - which instrument comes in when - I'll try to find those which follow each other really nicely, which is the case in this post, but sometimes I'll collect 3-6 other regenerations of the same solo so that I can cut and paste better solo endings to fit what follows. I keep a Timeline of each track/composition and the samples used: when they start and where relevant where they end, the + or - db and the channel biases, then I also note what changes have been made. For example my "Dreaming Of" which has 11 stem tracks I have the following notes:

* The Slow Jazz R Piano is +0 gain due to editing, cutting and pasting.
* The East Dock LF Guitar2 Solo is a hybrid from which I cut and pasted together 7 snippets from 5 different samples.
* The Guitar3 Hybb4 Solo is a hybrid of 6 different samples, plus the long opening note was increased in volume by 2db to even it out with the next loud high note which I normalised to bring the gain equal to what follows.
* The Electro Flute is a 2-part hybrid from the same sample. I used a part of the final sample to add to a part of the 1st to keep the rhythm.

Though that instrumental was more complex than most as hardly any solos worked with it. Also, re the 'The Guitar3 Hybb4 Solo' notes, in retrospect I shouldn't have increased the volume of the long opening note to even out with what follows, I should have left it as it was and decreased the volume of what follows as it would have saved later faffing! But c'est la vie!