peter5992
04-24-2008, 02:07 PM
Good morning everyone:
Greetings from beautiful and sunny San Francisco. I am new to this forum, so perhaps it is appropriate that I introduce myself.
I was born and raised in Holland. About twenty years ago I graduated from the Conservatory of Music (classical guitar) as well as law school. Figuring - probably correctly - that I would make a better living as a lawyer than as a classical guitar teacher, I joined a large law firm for a career in law, made partner, etc. In 2000 I moved to San Francisco for a sabbatical leave, doing a master of laws at the University of San Francisco (which is a very fine school, by the way). I liked it so much that I stayed in the Bay Area, and applied with and was hired by a San Francisco law firm. Then, two weeks on the new job, 9/11 happened - no more business transactions, and like so many other attorneys I lost my job. As a non-immigrant I was forced to leave the country and go back to Europe.
Then, interestingly, last year I won a Green Card through the US Green Card lottery, allowing me to move back to San Francisco, this time permanently, without job worries. Then I discovered Sibelius and immediately fell in love - and I figured, with all this good stuff happening to me, why don't I go back to music and become a composer? (If this sounds a little harebrained, consider this: it takes about 10 years to build a sustainable law practice - the US is heading to a recession making it extra difficult to build up a practice - talking from experience here). So after doing some research I joined TAXI (which is a great idea for all newbies btw) and got feedback to the effect that the music is not bad, even if not always on target for what they were looking for, but that the sound quality totally sucks and that I need to upgrade my libraries. After finding out exactly what they mean by that (not the law library with lots of books on shelves) I ended up here.
I am now in the process of getting all of my libaries to work with Sibelius (grrr - complicated - soundsets - manual sounds - preferred sounds - grrr grrr grrr) and getting myself educated on MIDI / audio and midi mapping / ports / bandwidth, bitrates, working through thousands of pages of user manuals, dealing with mysterious latency issues, reading books about the legal, financial and business issues involving the music business, and so on and so forth, all of which is pretty complicated for a newbie like me. Kind of reminds me of studying for the California bar. One day you're ecstatic if you think you're getting it, the next day you are totally depressed if you run into ten different new issues. Well, I'll get there, hopefully sometime this year. And if I don't, I can always go back to being a lawyer, right.
Attached is a picture of my little home studio. Not in the picture are a couple of other guitars (my trusted old Contreras classical guitar, a very nice custom acoustic electric Taylor 614ce) and my Roland synthesizer (Juno G). The EWQL libraries (symphonic orchestra platinum pro xp, symphonic choirs, RA, boesendorf, voices of passion, vocaloid 2) as well as other third party libraries (Kontakt 5 by Native Instruments) run on a slave computer (windows xp, Intel pentium quadcore 2.4 GHz, 32 bit, 4 GB RAM, 3 fast hard drives with 1.25 TB total space). Hooked up to the slave computer is the M-Audio profire 2626 audio / midi interface (firewire connection) - in addition to getting high fidelity audio output it allows me to hook my guitars, record acoustic guitar and perhaps vocals live, etc. Sibelius runs on my laptop, both are hooked up through FX Teleport.
For really big scores I will probably run into hardware limitations if I want to run many virtual instruments live simultaneously (unless I want to hook up many more slave computers and turn my appartment into a science project, which is only going to make PG&E happy) so I am looking at DAW software into which I would import Sibelius generated midi files, and that would allow for tracks to be recorded one by one. I now have a trial version of Reaper which is not very expensive and seems to be able to to all I want. Suggestions anyone? I am trying to keep things stupid and simple - I view the DAW software as a necessary evil, would much prefer to do as much as possible inside the Sibelius environment (not live audio recording, which Sibelius does not allow, and finetuning the mix and adding effects is probably going to have to be done on a separate DAW as well). I looked at Pro Tools M Powered which would work nicely with my soundcard, and enable me to generate a pro tool work session which in the future might be very useful if I want to take whatever I make to a studio to take it to a higher level or record live. All the major studios and producers seem to be using pro tools, from I learned at the ASCAP expo couple of weeks ago. However I am not sure whether it will accept the EWQL libraries as vst plugins (this website says it does not: http://www.music-software-reviews.com/recording_software.html#3...only_with_Pro_Tools_LE _Hardware). Obviously that would not do me any good. Any comments, anyone?
The ultimate goal is to become the next John Williams (the composer, not the classical guitarist). Nothing too ambitious, right, ok go ahead and flame me. But if I get to write commercials for toothpaste, dog food or kitchen cleaners and can make a living off that, I will be quite happy, too. The great thing about this business is that you are in complete control - if I work really hard, educate myself, and grind it out no matter what, I might actually make it work. And if I screw up, I will only have myself to blame (doesn't always work that way in the corporate world). And most importantly, it is nice to be creative again and work with smart and creative people.
So --- after this long introduction I look forward to learning a lot from this forum and getting to know you guys.
Take care,
Peter
www.summeroflovemusic.com (not yet up and running)
Greetings from beautiful and sunny San Francisco. I am new to this forum, so perhaps it is appropriate that I introduce myself.
I was born and raised in Holland. About twenty years ago I graduated from the Conservatory of Music (classical guitar) as well as law school. Figuring - probably correctly - that I would make a better living as a lawyer than as a classical guitar teacher, I joined a large law firm for a career in law, made partner, etc. In 2000 I moved to San Francisco for a sabbatical leave, doing a master of laws at the University of San Francisco (which is a very fine school, by the way). I liked it so much that I stayed in the Bay Area, and applied with and was hired by a San Francisco law firm. Then, two weeks on the new job, 9/11 happened - no more business transactions, and like so many other attorneys I lost my job. As a non-immigrant I was forced to leave the country and go back to Europe.
Then, interestingly, last year I won a Green Card through the US Green Card lottery, allowing me to move back to San Francisco, this time permanently, without job worries. Then I discovered Sibelius and immediately fell in love - and I figured, with all this good stuff happening to me, why don't I go back to music and become a composer? (If this sounds a little harebrained, consider this: it takes about 10 years to build a sustainable law practice - the US is heading to a recession making it extra difficult to build up a practice - talking from experience here). So after doing some research I joined TAXI (which is a great idea for all newbies btw) and got feedback to the effect that the music is not bad, even if not always on target for what they were looking for, but that the sound quality totally sucks and that I need to upgrade my libraries. After finding out exactly what they mean by that (not the law library with lots of books on shelves) I ended up here.
I am now in the process of getting all of my libaries to work with Sibelius (grrr - complicated - soundsets - manual sounds - preferred sounds - grrr grrr grrr) and getting myself educated on MIDI / audio and midi mapping / ports / bandwidth, bitrates, working through thousands of pages of user manuals, dealing with mysterious latency issues, reading books about the legal, financial and business issues involving the music business, and so on and so forth, all of which is pretty complicated for a newbie like me. Kind of reminds me of studying for the California bar. One day you're ecstatic if you think you're getting it, the next day you are totally depressed if you run into ten different new issues. Well, I'll get there, hopefully sometime this year. And if I don't, I can always go back to being a lawyer, right.
Attached is a picture of my little home studio. Not in the picture are a couple of other guitars (my trusted old Contreras classical guitar, a very nice custom acoustic electric Taylor 614ce) and my Roland synthesizer (Juno G). The EWQL libraries (symphonic orchestra platinum pro xp, symphonic choirs, RA, boesendorf, voices of passion, vocaloid 2) as well as other third party libraries (Kontakt 5 by Native Instruments) run on a slave computer (windows xp, Intel pentium quadcore 2.4 GHz, 32 bit, 4 GB RAM, 3 fast hard drives with 1.25 TB total space). Hooked up to the slave computer is the M-Audio profire 2626 audio / midi interface (firewire connection) - in addition to getting high fidelity audio output it allows me to hook my guitars, record acoustic guitar and perhaps vocals live, etc. Sibelius runs on my laptop, both are hooked up through FX Teleport.
For really big scores I will probably run into hardware limitations if I want to run many virtual instruments live simultaneously (unless I want to hook up many more slave computers and turn my appartment into a science project, which is only going to make PG&E happy) so I am looking at DAW software into which I would import Sibelius generated midi files, and that would allow for tracks to be recorded one by one. I now have a trial version of Reaper which is not very expensive and seems to be able to to all I want. Suggestions anyone? I am trying to keep things stupid and simple - I view the DAW software as a necessary evil, would much prefer to do as much as possible inside the Sibelius environment (not live audio recording, which Sibelius does not allow, and finetuning the mix and adding effects is probably going to have to be done on a separate DAW as well). I looked at Pro Tools M Powered which would work nicely with my soundcard, and enable me to generate a pro tool work session which in the future might be very useful if I want to take whatever I make to a studio to take it to a higher level or record live. All the major studios and producers seem to be using pro tools, from I learned at the ASCAP expo couple of weeks ago. However I am not sure whether it will accept the EWQL libraries as vst plugins (this website says it does not: http://www.music-software-reviews.com/recording_software.html#3...only_with_Pro_Tools_LE _Hardware). Obviously that would not do me any good. Any comments, anyone?
The ultimate goal is to become the next John Williams (the composer, not the classical guitarist). Nothing too ambitious, right, ok go ahead and flame me. But if I get to write commercials for toothpaste, dog food or kitchen cleaners and can make a living off that, I will be quite happy, too. The great thing about this business is that you are in complete control - if I work really hard, educate myself, and grind it out no matter what, I might actually make it work. And if I screw up, I will only have myself to blame (doesn't always work that way in the corporate world). And most importantly, it is nice to be creative again and work with smart and creative people.
So --- after this long introduction I look forward to learning a lot from this forum and getting to know you guys.
Take care,
Peter
www.summeroflovemusic.com (not yet up and running)