Again, despite my alarming inability to post at regular intervals I finally have an initial version of my Last Fantasy Suite for Symphonic Band.
This piece has been a long time coming, almost a year in fact at this point. I started this journey by volunteering to write a piece for middle school level band at a school I had previous taught at. Not only did it seem like a fun experience to be able to write for students whom I had developed a strong relationship with it also seemed like an important personal challenge since I have very little first hand experience with band instruments.
With these thoughts in mind I jumped ahead into the planning stage. I decided early on that I wanted to put together a medley of tunes I had composed for a video game that never got finished. This was important to me partially because they seemed like they would transcribe well for middle schoolers and partially because it celebrated my love of video games, something that the student know about me. Thus it worked out on a personal and professional level.
And then the hard part came.
I realized very quickly that limited experience with band instruments was a very generous way of putting it. Basically I sucked at transpositions when I was a music student and sucked at it still as a young professional. On top of that I needed to constantly check in on instrument ranges and what ranges were typically playable by young musicians on top of that! And please don’t even get me started on the idiosyncrasies of percussion notation…I think I may perish!
Even after the notation process was over it seemed to be one error after another with the DAWs. Basically the easy man’s version is that I really need more firepower on my computer to process 18 high CPU demanding instruments at the same time. (The more technically version is I’m pretty sure I’m spiking my CPU due to a lack of RAM, which since I don’t have ports available for that it’s probably upgrading time). The result was that I processed my instruments in groups of 4. While I tried to do my best to make it mix and line up okay frankly it is probably one of my worst mixed pieces. At some point I’ll have to probably remaster it but for now it serves its purpose.
It’s been an incredible journey and thank you to everyone who has followed me on it and encouraged me in spite of my infrequent posts.
You can check it out on my sound cloud here.
It will be up on youtube at some point. I’ll be honest, I’m kinda hungry and will probably put it off till later. :)