Status: just emailed my old composition professor at OU asking for recommendations on orchestration books. ♬ The one class I really wish I’d taken while studying composition.

Dear readers (and listeners-to-music!): I thought I had nothing to share from today’s composing… but I was wrong! I made some progress! If you saw the Day 5 post when it went up, pop back over and give the update a look’n’listen.

A thing that has gotten way better since the last time I was messing with MIDI stuff: almost all hardware supports USB out now, instead of needing insane MIDI-to-USB adapters.

In semi-related news: my fingers are remembering how to play somewhat more complex things on the piano again, and it’s been really, really good for my soul.

Got our daughters iPods Nano — pre-touch screen! — and it’s delightful to watch them learn how to use this “old” technology.

I’m ridiculously excited to sit down and listen to the whole of Christopher Tin’s newly-released To Shiver the Sky — an album I backed on Kickstarter back in early 2018. Worth the wait? YES.

A thing I’m extremely committed to: any orchestral sample libraries I buy must absolutely pay royalties to the musicians they recorded the samples with.

A thing I would love: Logic Pro on the iPad and a rich instrument sample library ecosystem to go with it. I love working on my big iMac, but I’d also love to be able to work in Logic and with great sounds on my iPad.

Sooooo much to learn about Logic Pro and the new virtual instruments I got via early-Black-Friday-sale… but I’m having a ridiculous amount of fun with it. (Good samples make a huge difference!)

I’m in an archival mood this evening, so I’m exporting all my old Sibelius files into MusicXML and MIDI: proprietary formats are bad for long-term storage!

Along the way, I’ve discovered music I wrote in the 2000s that I had completely forgotten about. 🤯

Getting ready to upgrade my main machine to macOS 11. First things first, though: I have a ton of musical scores in Sibelius’ format, I’ve since moved to Dorico, and my old version of Sibelius doesn’t launch on Big Sur. So: spending my morning exporting everything to .mxl.

Dear Apple: would it have killed you to include a headphone port on the iPad Pro? Using it for music production would be a lot easier if you had.

I would love a study score of Ludwig Göransson’s “Come With Me” from the closing credits for The Mandalorian Chapter 16. (Hint hint, Disney+ — there is money to be made here!)

Status: not far from the point where I just sell my iMac in favor of running a 5k monitor off of my M1 MacBook Air, which is literally twice as fast.

Only thing holding me back is RAM, which does matter for large music productions.

What the heck do people who do this stuff for a living use for editing ID3 tags and publishing? The cheap-or-free tools available out there are terrible for the “I want to make this piece of music seem professionally-produced” scenario: they all focus on “manage your library!”

I feel about Jon Foreman’s Departures almost exactly how I feel about The Mountain Goats’ Goths: I really like it! — but the opening track promises (or at least suggests!) a different album, and I really, really want that one to exist, too.

The slightly bonkers feeling of opening a large Dorico project on my M1 MacBook Air… and it being noticeably smoother and faster on the Rosetta build than it is on my late 2015 (and then-top-of-the-line) iMac. 🤯 Imagining the native speed and an M1X etc…

Of the many small and large reminders of God’s common grace and goodness in creation in the world, the one I’m most grateful for today is the Berlin Philharmonic, which has been an astonishingly excellent orchestra for a very long time now.

(Today’s discovery: their Dvořák Symphony No. 9! 🤩)

Related: these collections all get filed under “shut up and take my money”.

A thing I love about Spitfire Audio: that they pay ongoing royalties to the musicians whose playing they sample. This is as it should be!

I’d love to learn about other virtual instrument libraries which do this as I slowly broaden out my samples — got recommendations?

StaffPad is quickly becoming my favorite tool for composing. Its handwriting recognition is far from perfect, but it’s the best thing I’ve found for writing music (much the way I would on paper!) while still having digital affordances.

Bonus: pair it with the Spitfire instruments… 🤩

Exported a MusicXML file from StaffPad and imported it into Dorico yesterday. Overall it worked extremely well, but I definitely found some quirks along the way. In particular, the random extra eighth note rest it added at one point was… odd. 😅 🎵

One thing I discovered immediately upon importing a score from StaffPad to Dorico is that while I really like the Spitfire Symphony Orchestra samples I have for StaffPad… I looooove Spitfire’s BBC Symphony Orchestra samples. 🎵

(Wanted: BBC SO for StaffPad.)

Wanted: a Leuchtturm1917 notebook (which is, at this point, my favorite all-around notebook)… with music staves.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that music theory isn’t helpful for composition. I’m sitting here formalizing what I sketched out on a keyboard, and my ears did not mislead me: but now I understand where my ears led me and therefore can work much more intentionally with this idea.

This day did not go as I expected and I feel “uninspired.” I’m sitting down to compose anyway because: that’s now how art (or anything in life, really) works. “Inspiration” is nice but doing the work is the important bit.

In the process of publishing a master of my “Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight”. At last! 😅 One lesson learned from working on this off and on over the last 8 months: next time, I will not use a MIDI export; I’ll perform it into Logic.

I realized, in the midst of working on a mockup in Logic, that I needed to make a small, but meaningful, tweak to the score for the piece I’m writing (move a series of notes forward by one quaver) as it stands in StaffPad… and… cannot? (This is trivial in Dorico!)

The more time I spend with other apps (looking at you today, StaffPad), the more persuaded I am that Dorico’s model, where notes are primary and measures are arbitrary, secondary groupings — layered on top of the notes — is both more correct and more useful design than the bars-first approach nearly every other notation software takes.

Am unreasonably excited about this Spitfire Audio Summer Sale purchase… and equally unreasonably impatient about the fact that the downloads will complete sometime after I’m asleep tonight. 🤣

I think I’m now obliged to #OneOrchestra #BBCSOPro or something, right? 🎵

Tiny bonus comment on my post on MusicXML: the schema itself is incredibly well-designed, and the docs are fabulous. Props to the good folks behind it!