[LAU] [Music] Synthetic Air on a B-Thing

Christopher Arndt chris at chrisarndt.de
Tue Oct 11 01:50:30 CEST 2022


Am 11.10.22 um 01:12 schrieb David Kastrup:
 > First, thanks for _not_ using the "Air on a G string" compaction

I think magic of the piece is its fugue-ness, so it was a deliberate choice.

The title comes from the (probably silly) desire to include some kind of 
pun on the Behringer name :)

For the rest you're hitting exactly on the points I'm also not 100% 
pleased with.

 > For me, that distracts from the measured solemnity of the piece and
 > makes it swim about the bass part.

The (maybe) over-use of portamento on most patches for the upper three 
voices is due to the monophonic nature of the synth. It allows to play 
it with a sort of legato feel, while still having a re-triggering 
envelope, which is needed to give each note some shape and not have the 
third, forth, etc. note in a legato line degrade into basically a 
sine-wave, due to the filter being too closed. If the portamento time is 
too short, the retriggering of the envelopes will be too obvious and it 
will not sound like a string or woodwind instrument anymore, but like 
some kind of keys instrument.

 > For this particular recording, I find that you have much too much of a
 > pause between first and second halve

Yes, I'm conscious that this a rather long pause and I thought about 
halving it, but then decided to leave it like that, because I like the 
second half of the composition a lot better and wanted to have it "stand 
on its own".

 > Then there is some rather large slowdown [...] that does not seem to
 > serve any purpose.

That is the point were the build up to the crescendo begins, and to me 
marks a definite division in the second part. Maybe it was done a bit 
clumsily, I agree.

 > Apropos: what happened to the second repetition of the second part?

I felt that the piece was already long enough and extending it to >5 
minutes would wear out most casual listeners. If I had chosen a faster 
tempo, I would have probably kept it. Also, it meant that I had to track 
12 bars times 15 voices less and I was already late in finishing the 
piece ;)

 > Of course it is easy for me to complain

And I'm aware that with these re-interpretations of famous pieces you 
are always faced with one of the following:

- If you stick close to the original, as a I did, you will be measured 
against beloved performances from the past and the perception that 
people have how this piece "should" sound.

- If you radically change aspects of the piece (instrumentation, rhythm, 
style etc.), you probably loose half of the audience from the start.

;-)


Chris


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