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"Midnight Voyage" a Staffpad cinematic effort
I put some effort into StaffPad to create something cinematic. The CineSamples libraries are on a 50% off sales again but the default instruments are very good. You just don't get as many articulations as a general distinction.
Comments
@Linearlineman recommended the free app "Mandalize" to add visuals to music:
Wow, productive weekend for you bro. Is this generated or hand-composed?
That’s good.
StaffPad only accepts pencil, MIDI and Music XML file imports. This was input painfully using the pencil but I'm developing some productivity tricks and I'll get better/faster with practice.
You need to know your music theory to spilt chords onto multiple staffs.
I wish the MIDI import was more reliable to pull in auto-generated progressions... I'm hoping it improves over time.
It's rumored that StaffPad might have merged with the Musescore folks... I think Musescore is owned by the Ultimate Guitar company that bought ToneBridge and gave it away.
Great stuff, are you available for the next Peter Jackson film?
Very enjoyable. I can picture a frozen castle while listening.
Those female choir from Staffpad too?
Isn't it great that we can make these sounds on an iPad? The pencil sure beats the mouse for writing notes and rhythms, IMHO. A touch pad wouldn't be any good either.
I threw the pitch sink at this one to learn more about how to notate the percussion and what the various "VOXOS Choir" voices are like... that solo soprano is bad ass. Perfect pitch and she only slightly sounds robotic at the very high end of her range. The vibrato seems natural.
The staccato choir borrowed from the bass and cello lines is my main regret. VOXOS has something like 30 syllables but I need to Google for more details. Maybe I can add some erzatz Latin and get a "Omen" vibe going like "Camina Burana".
Nice track!
FYI: Damn... it's looking like the VOXOS Choirs don't have the 30 syllables that the desktop version does. Probably a file space and RAM limitation of the IOS version. The voices basically seem to say "Ahh" no matter what Lyric or Text I add underneath the notes.
Still... Ahh is pretty cool too for S-A-T-B, Soprano Solo, Boys Choir, etc.
Wow. Captivating and dynamic. I will have to look into the choir thing too - I thought you could do different syllables...
Was this all done in a weekend?
It was an all nighter. So many of the parts are "cut and paste" but with new instruments to
make it sound fresh. "Cut and paste" and moving notes around on the copies is a fast way to
get a lot of bars done fast and avoid all the note-by-note pencil drawing of note heads.
That's why I wanted to be able to import Piano Motifs MIDI's... to get structures I could use
to edit for my own melodies and chords. But the MIDI import kept breaking on complex imports so I stopped using StaffPad and went back to making Mozaic generators. But the results are worth the effort. I can play this for non-forum folks and not have them look at me and say "Is this supposed to be good music?" My wife said "Your music is like a character in the movie." I don't play her my normal swill but there's still a lot of me in those generative pieces.
Beautiful. Try flat.io - free app, I guess very good at midi import and then can export to MusicXML. Haven’t tried it yet but someone on here mentioned it - maybe @MisplacedDevelopment
I tried pushing the MIDI through "Notion" which can save as "Music XML". But StaffPad failed
on long Piano Motifs projects.
I'm just going to learn to enjoy the handmade process... you get into a creative flow and the time just flies by. You can add a small bit and listen at any point instantly without any wait times so you're always involved. What I hate are the pen strokes that aren't recognized and send me off to elect the eraser and try again. They say I'll improve and fewer gestures will be
ignored.
Excellent! Definitely film score material. Maybe a new Elder Scrolls game soundtrack?
You nailed the cinematic feel for sure @McD very nice!
I'm a huge movie lover so being able to channel my musical heroes on an iPad is
truly a gift that arrived in my final years.
In my youth I'd have had to generate a massive score on paper, copy the parts and find an group of musicians willing to put the time into releasing to get anything close to this experience. The digital age is truly empowering for so many artists to remove all the obstacles and the gate keepers. Of course, better work can be done on desktop tools but at what price? After all, the potential to profit from this addiction is pretty slim for most of us. And you need to be really driven... I am not.
NOTE: I opened my iPad and this project did NOT appear in the StaffPad
list of projects. Luckily, I found the project file on the iCloud in the StaffPad
directory. But that's strange that the app doesn't scan that folder and list
all the projects stored there. There's also a StaffPad folder "On My iPad".
Does anyone know the way this program deals with storage?
My projects are stored in the iCloud folder and it should be looking in there to populate the library section but you are right that it does sometimes forget or fail to index on startup and you get that sinking feeling that everything has been deleted. iCloud access can be a bit hit and miss so maybe it did not get a response in time and this caused the the indexing to fail.
It corrects itself normally by restarting or finding and opening the project manually but it is the main reason I created this thing https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/43953/ios-file-backup-pythonista-script
I can handle losing a few AUM presets but not my precious scores! I should make it clear that I have never actually lost anything with StaffPad but I am not taking any chances
BTW I gave up trying to draw exactly the note I am looking for as the recognition is too hit and miss. I normally just draw a quarter note and drag it left or right to the correct length. I do wish they would let go of the handwriting only thing and allow alternative entry methods. The worst for me is trying to add sharps/flats/naturals. If they allowed a chromatic scale then I could just drag up or down to position the note. I think they could learn a thing or two from MTS, the note entry there is much more fluid, in my opinion.
@McD Really enjoyed the song, I still can't get over the sounds we can get out of the iPad now versus just a couple of years ago!
If you have not already found the list of syllables that you can make Voxos say then check page 5 of this manual https://cinesamples.com/file/productFile/file/olsa8ayi6v4drzsc9d2m2a7wboj.pdf
I had not heard the merger rumour. My StaffPad investment is very large so I hope nothing bad comes of this.
Could you imagine doing this on an iPad three years ago?
Great stuff. So in order to compose this piece did you actually have to write the musical notation? Just trying to clarify the composition process, is it writing notes down on a staffpad rather than actually performing?
@McD this is awesome - I love movies too and u nailed it!!!
This needs more time on the front page. Also, @MisplacedDevelopment have you used the choir to produce other syllables?
@mjcouche Not in anger yet as I have not found a use for them so far but this kind of thing works:
Yes. You must have and use an Apple pencil and you draw in notes and rests on a music paper user interface. There are many YouTube videos demo'ing the user interface and a lot more using screen recordings showing music playing and scrolling the score. A good combination of both is this video by the product's creative mastermind, composer David
William Hearn. It's a huge composing session, so just poke around to see the input and hear the final work:
Yes. It's a classic batch process with this small distinction. The music is converted to audio
in the background after the completion of every single bar of music entered. So, at any point you can hit play and hear the results input thus far. So, this distributed batch avoids the typical lag time in rendering from metadata to audio that we get in most DAW's converting MIDI to audio. People want this feature in their DAW's too, I expect. It's a game changer for work flow.
The other big distinction over MIDI is the mapping of musical articulations to sample selection: accents, staccato's, etc are all features of the various optional sound libraries.
Like Bartok pizzicato's where the string is snapped against the fretboard for a more percussive effect. CineSamples has a lot of Bartok pizza capable string libraries.
I think more people could benefit from the product if it had a more robust MIDI import
feature. You could develop a workflow that generates a MIDI file from a program that allows
chord progressions for input and then render the MIDI into audio backing files of strings.
I tried this process and got frustrated but it can be made to work with enough troubleshooting of the "envelope"... by being determined to "find a way".
Thanks... I tried all the S-A-T-B voices and got nuttin'. I'll try the "Full Chorus".
By coincidence they have just added an interactive tutorial to the app to try and guide you through writing the most common notation.
Nice... but it's important for shoppers here to know that the StaffPad implementation does not include all these DAW features like the "phrase builder". We get little specific documentation but the choirs are truly awesome. So, it's a tradeoff between price and features that we all navigate.
To do this properly, I'd need to invest a lot more on Native Instruments tools and it's suite of add-ons in Logic Pro. Staffpad seems expensive to us but's it's still about 20% of the cost of the desktop tools.
I'm contemplating $200 of library purchases because they are at 50% off this month and have been about every 3 months for a while. Most of the string libraries are $100 each.
I gave the choir a workout test to see what's possible with syllables.
There are 8 "instruments" selectable to add to a composition (you can multiples and
any instrument can play polyphony/chords).
Only the FULL CHORUS can articulate the syllables. I played:
https://forum.audiob.us/uploads/editor/1l/bmliwtfw4k7u.png
There’s a full walkthrough video of Staffpad Voxos library, going through all the syllables and other stuff. It’s found through the store in the Staffpad app, doesn’t seem searchable on Youtube though...