J.S. Bach: Two Part Invention in E flat Major
A little olde-tyme electronic Bach for you...
A day project serving as therapy in getting over a nasty bronchial flu.
With apologies to J. S. Bach, W. Carlos and Glenn Gould
(on whose performance this version was modeled).
2part_EbM_Mix.mp3
2partEbM_L.amc
2partEbM_R.amc
2ptEbM_Lacc.amc
2ptEbM_Racc.amc
Bach2Part_EbM_noclick.mid
Modus Operandi
I made the decision early on to avoid quantization, in deference to Carlos' abhorrence of machinistic timing in performances of this sort. Not being that great of a keyboardist, however, I knew I needed to play in time to some kind of rhythmic reference. As an experiment, I pulled out an old Glenn Gould album of two and three part inventions and recorded his rendition of the EbM invention into my PC with Cool Edit. Then using the time stretch feature I slowed the recording down to half speed, and made an MP3 of the song. Reason is my main axe these days, so I used it to create the basic MIDI tracks before bringing the Moog Modular V into play. In typical kludge fashion, I set things up so I could play the MP3 in Winamp while I recorded the left hand part into Reason (triggering a sampled piano sound loaded in an NN19) at the same time. Once I had a passable MIDI recording of the left hand part, I killed Winamp and just recorded the MIDI of the right hand part into Reason in time with the left hand part. Afterward, I did a little cheating - moving some notes around here and there to get the note timings a little closer. There are still segments of the tune that stutter here and there, but I got things to where I figured "Hey, close enough for government work". The last step was to double the MIDI tempo to bring the performance up to speed, and export the MIDI tracks of the two parts as a .mid file.
I embarked on this little experiment because up to now I've only been using the MMV as a standalone synth, trying to learn the ins and outs of programming sounds and gauging the CPU demands of the program; I had not yet attempted to use it in conjunction with a sequencer. Being a closed system, I couldn't use Reason's sequencer as a means of triggering MMV machines directly. I don't have Cubase, Nuendo or any other modern music software for working with digital audio & MIDI at the same time. The only program I have for recording both audio and MIDI at the same time is Voyetra's musty old Digital Orchestrator Pro.
Amazingly enough, this was all I needed. Using Hubi's Loopback Device I was able to get Digital Orchestrator Pro tracks to trigger MMV machines in the Moog Modular V program running in standalone mode. I got two MMV machines set up, each one dedicated to the two MIDI tracks playing in DOP. After getting decent sounds programmed on the MMV machines, I duped both of the main MIDI tracks and stripped out a number of the notes to create additional "emphasis" tracks for the two parts, dedicating each of these new tracks to two more MMV machines. (I kinda cheated, I didn't create new MMV patches for the emphasis tracks from scratch, I just found a couple of presets from the Engel and Lupo banks that I liked and tweaked them to taste.)
On my Pentium IV 2.8gHz machine, this all worked with minimal hassles and very infrequent digital hiccups or other unwanted artifacts. All the MMVs were set to polyphony mode, and I found that if I turned up the release settings on the VCAs or used excessive amounts of MMV chorus/delay, it wasn't too hard to overdrive the CPU. Ultimately I decided to keep release settings to a minimum and to hold off on the effects until the mixdown stage.
I could have used DOP to capture the digital audio coming from each of the four MMV machines, but I decided to use Cool Edit instead (since that's where the tracks were going to end up anyway). Muting all but one track, I had DOP playing a sequence, triggering an MMV machine, and capturing the digital audio into Cool Edit in real time. I repeated this procedure for each of the four tracks. Thinking about it, I'm really amazed that I had DOP, MMV (with four synths loaded) and Cool Edit all running at once on my PC with no crashes or problems.
Once I had the four tracks in Cool Edit and got them properly aligned, I added effects and worked on the mix. When everything sounded good to my ears I rendered the mix as a WAV and as an MP3, wrote this web page and got things set up in this little corner of my domain.
In addition to the MP3, there are links above for the .mid file as well as the MMV .acm files for the four Moog setups used in the creation of this recording, in case any of you are suitably ambitious and want to play with the raw materials of the track. Hey, maybe you can work up an improved version...
This was big fun for me, SOB was a major accompaniment to my high school years, I always wanted to do one of these and the lovely Moog Modular V makes it possible to get that classic beefy analog synth sound so characteristic of all those Moog albums from the late '60s and early '70s. I may re-do the keyboard parts to get the timing to gel a little better at some point - not today though. Think I'll go back to bed now.
-doc
10/11/2003