mike’s music pages

Archive for December, 2011

I am not much of a composer, but I love making music on my computer. Fortunately, many great works have already been composed that one can use to make music on a computer. You can find scores for much great music online for free. You may even be able to find midi sequences for the music you want, which will save you some time. For this post, I sequenced a popular piece by J. S. Bach, his “Air” from the Orchestral Suite No. 3. You can listen to it on YouTube.

I chose sampled orchestral sounds for playback, but you can use any sounds that you wish. So, instead of Bach played with strings, you could have electronic Bach.

I don’t have good keyboard skills, so I used the music notation program Sibelius to create my sequence. First I entered the score into Sibelius.

By notating the score, I could more easily check for errors visually or by listening to the playback in Sibelius. Once I was satisfied with the score, I exported it to a midi file. I then imported the midi file into my digital audio workstation (DAW),  Cakewalk Sonar X1.

In Sonar I used instances of Dimension Pro and Garritan Personal Orchestra and loaded the harpsichord, violins, violas, cellos and basses.

I edited midi controllers and note velocities to make the instruments more expressive. The result is what you hear in the video, which shows the piano roll view of Sonar with custom colors.