today Lydia and I had a quick look at what I’ve written so far with some of the electronics. The main point of today was to clarify bits of the score (mainly caused by my sketch handwriting!) and to see how it sounded with the electronics as well as a bit of experimentation. The samples below are of bit of the piece with the reverb just in stereo. It worked almost as I expected but not quite. The reverb time needs tweaked and the envelope following needs tweaked a bit more, it sounded like there was too much verb bleeding through when there shouldn’t have been any and not enough when there should have been loads. Easy enough to do just change the maths about a little in the patch.
Lydia suggested some things which I hadn’t thought of but work really well like ending the opening notes as sul pont. In my mind this blends really nicely with the harmonics later on so its definitely in. Also a few things came to light which I should have realised when I was writing (because I know the physics of it) but didn’t, specifically glissing a harmonic trill doesn’t work. What I mean by a harmonic trill is moving between the real note and the harmonic in the same position, basically changing the pressure of the left hand.
Overall everything worked nicely and its a positive start to the piece. I think we are going to make this Friday session a regular occurrence or at least as regular as possible to work through it. Hopefully I’ll have another version with the edits we talked about today in it.