Man, I can’t believe this project is finished.  It’s been in the works a long time.  Again, something that sounded very easy turned out to be involved and lengthy.  This time, despite it being a music project, I was completely ignorant of the effort that was going to be involved.

Basically, I wanted to improve my recording of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto on the electric guitar.  I recorded it a long time ago with synthesizer tracks replacing the orchestra.  Although I was happy with the recording, the synth sounds had always been the weakness.  Just a year or year and a half ago, a friend, colleague, and fellow guitarist suggested that I redo the MIDI tracks with real orchestral recordings.

I finally got around to looking into this.  However, I was convinced that all that was involved in converting a MIDI file into orchestral sounds was running the MIDI file through some high end samples and call it good.  Man, was I wrong.

I started out by posting a job on Elance requesting someone to convert a MIDI file into a WAV file.  I got numerous responses whose prices ran the gamut from $50 to $500.  This seemed weird, but I didn’t really think much of it.  I ended up picking a really nice and knowledgeable guy in Argentina.  He was way on the low end of the price, but I really picked him because he sounded informed and communicated well.  However, when it came time to share the job with him, I got a nice but firm email stating that he’d misunderstood the requirements and that it was way beyond what he had originally had bidded on.  He was nice enough to spend a lot of time with me to explain exactly what would be involved.  About the same time, I met a guy in China, Xiao Xie, through another friend who, having studied music and was working in the music industry here in Shenzhen as a game and advertisement composer, seemed to be a great fit for the job.  So, I enlisted him.  A great find!

His English was pretty good, better than my Chinese, but at least he had a command of the technical music terms in English, so we could get by.  He basically confirmed what the guy in Argentina had stated:  we needed to render each instrument into a wave file, and usually each track would need to be rendered multiple times.  For example, we’d need to render some violin sections with long bow strokes with pronounced vibrato, other times we’d need to use a swift marcato, and then everything in between.  Strings are always the most difficult, but we had to do the same for winds and brass as well.  On top of that, for the challenging full orchestral moments, we rendered multiple versions of the same track to give it a full ensemble sound.  We neede to separate some tracks, like some of the flute tracks, so we could bring out the melody better.  Then, we went back, mixed it all together, reworking sections multiple times so that the balance would be good.  We added equalization, reverb, and so on.

As you can see, this is way more work than simply turning on orchestral samples, pressing “play” on the MIDI file and “record” on the WAV recorder.  We usually spent one day per weekend, for anywhere from two to six hours working through the piece.  It took about three to four months to do the whole thing.  We worked hard on it, got testy with each other from time to time, but remained friends throughout. A celebration is called for.