Prent Rodger's CD

List,

PR's CD just came today, and it is a real treat to have 11 of his
pieces all playable in fine reproduction! It is intriguing to hear
the progression of his compositional chops hand-in-hand with getting
more and more fluent with both Csound and sample usage.

The one thing that struck me is the audio presentation. I frequently
listen to pieces (even familiar ones) with headphones

http://www.headphone.com/

because so many details of a recording become apparant (beyond their
usage for late-night, non-spousal-disturbing attributes), and this
was very noticeable on Prent's CD. Many of the settings seem a bit
back on the 'sound stage', and there is a nice airiness about the
sounds. This is in addition to some very creative 'mixing'
and 'panning'. I've put these attributes in quotes, because it is my
impression that Prent does this all in the Csound environment (IOW,
even though the end result is a wave file spit out, I don't think
Prent is doing any post-processing with reverb units, etc.).

Maybe Prent would care to address this aspect of his music creation
process?

Anyhow, a very good compilation, and recommended to (especially)
those interested in the diamond incarnations of JI...

Cheers,
Jon

--- In MakeMicroMusic@y..., "jonszanto" <JSZANTO@A...> wrote:
> The one thing that struck me is the audio presentation. Many of
> the settings seem a bit
> back on the 'sound stage', and there is a nice airiness about the
> sounds. This is in addition to some very creative 'mixing'
> and 'panning'. I've put these attributes in quotes, because it is
my
> impression that Prent does this all in the Csound environment
> Maybe Prent would care to address this aspect of his music creation
> process?

Jon,

Thanks for the kind words about the music. I use Csound extensively.
It permits me to control many aspects of the instruments, including
pan and fade. In fact, for each note, I specify the following
parameters:

1. Start time
2. Duration
3. Velocity (volume)
4. Note (out of the 43 in the scale, I only use 29 or so)
5. Octave
6. Instrument Voice (from the McGill University Master Sample CD-ROM
& some sound effects records for the breaking glass, sweeping,
restaurant sounds)
7. Stereo location (in the pan field)
8. Envelope (allows control over attack, sustain, decay, release,
crescendo & decrescendo)
9. Glissando (move up or down without a re-attack)
10. Up-sample (pick a higher or lower sample than the one used to
create the instrument. Helps to create a miniature piano, or a more
mellow or strident trumpet)

When I get it sounding the way I want, I use Csound to "convolve" the
sound with one of several chapel interiors from Angelo Farina
(http://pcfarina.eng.unipr.it/). I have been using Teatro Alcorcon in
Madrid lately. Convolve is a digital signal processing algorithm that
somehow takes a sound and makes it have the temporal characteristics
of another sound. I use it for reverb effects, but others use it to
filter.

Most of the characteristics of the instruments come from the McGill
sample set, which was painstakingly put together by the recordists at
McGill University several years ago. They wanted to create a perfect
44 kHz stereo sample set for a sample based synthesizer that would
some day come along with unlimited memory. (Like Csound!) The set is
full of problems, inconsistencies, out of tune samples, empty
beginnings and other things that make it a challenge to use for
samplers. But with some care and feeding, it works great. I still
can't get over the cello martele sample. Edgy.

Prent Rodgers
Mercer Island, WA