SECOND DIGITIPHONY
("Di - ji – ti- fo – nee")
A musical form comprising of several movements or parts that incorporates elements of both digital
(generated by computers and virtual instruments) and symphonic (orchestral) instrumentation
The first ever Digitiphony was performed by my band, u kay hytz - you can hear it here . This is my first solo attempt at one.
Please scroll down to the bottom if you want to read this in chronological order !
24th September 2011
The media edits are all finally finished, and in doing them I ended up remixing and extending (slightly) the whole piece. Media edits are here, the full version stream is below. It will be available at iTunes soon, it's also up at CDBaby (follow the buy link on the player below).
Digitiphony 2 - All Four Movements (40 mins) by m l dunn
17th May 2011
I have started on the media edits, I'm about 12 or 13 in (listen here), but I don't have quite the same momentum behind me anymore, partly as busy with other things now, partly as I'm already starting to think about Digitiphony 3 - having veered the whole thing well towards the Orchestral with No. 2, and what with the first Digitiphony being indisputably electro, I think my aim has to be to find the halfway point between those two genre extremes... watch this space. If anyone wants to hear the media edits from Digitiphony 2 as I finish them they will be put here, or please mail me (address on contact page) if you want an edit from later on in the work (movements 2, 3 or 4) and let me know where the section you are interested in lies (minutes and seconds). I may even be able to make you a custom edit.
Fini :) Thanks for reading !
28th April 2011
Did I say soon ? Full version now available at CD Baby here
27th April 2011
It's taken a while, but the vocal additions to movements 2, 3 and 4 are now finished. I doubled each SATB line with some real voices to liven up the Wordbuilder/EWQL Choirs - here's a couple of excerpts, first from the second movement -
and from near the end of the fourth
- so that's it. After a surprisingly brief spell of mastering in Ozone 4 it felt like it had reached 'a stage', for now at least. Hopefully one day I (or, even better, somebody else) may get to score this out for a real-life Orchestral performance with a couple of workstations/keyboard players, but for now it is complete. Or I've had enough of it, one of the two. The full, finished version will be up at CD Baby soon and iTunes etc shortly after that.
2nd February 2011
I think I've finished. I still have to go back and work on some of the orchestration/arrangements and make the edits for the media edition (which could take me a long time) but it's pretty much there in structure. I really struggled with the 3rd movement. I wanted it to provide a leftfield/electro contrast to the rest of the piece (more like the U Kay Hytz Digitiphony) but didn't want it to lose touch with the overall feel. I found it a difficult balance to strike and I stalled several times :( The first thing I have to do though is to get some singers (myself included) in to the studio to lend weight to the choir parts, which are currently programmed into Wordbuilder/EWQL Symphonic Choirs. Half way through writing the 3rd movement I upgraded the EWQL choirs to the Play (2.1) edition with Wordbuilder integrated. I thought it was going to be brilliant, but it was a bit of a disaster - the upgrade works worse than the original Kontakt version, for me at least, and I ended up going back to finish it in Kontakt, not using the upgrade at all.... £100 poorer and having wasted a whole week trying to get it to work.
The full virtual instrument line up, so far is (in Nuendo 4.3) : EWQLSO Gold (plus close mic upgrade), EWQLSC, VSL Strings (Special Edition), VSL Clarinet and Flugelhorn, Sound Magic Red Wings, Spectrasonics Atmosphere and Trilogy, Native Instruments Absynth and Kontakt and a tiny touch of LM9. Click on the triangle below to hear all 4 movements - 39 minutes long.
2nd January 2011
2nd (slow) movement is pretty much finished. As well as the instruments I'm using for the first movement I have used Soundmagic's Red Wings virtual piano and EWQL Symphonic Choirs. I plan to add some real voices to the choirs at a later date. Click the symbol below to listen - let it run, it starts quietly :) It's about 9 and a half minutes long.
4th December 2010
I have finished the first movement. Click the triangle below to play it (you'll need flash). it is about nine and a half minutes long. I have almost finished the last movement and am about 6 minutes into the second. This is pretty much how I want it to sound - more Orchestral than ukh's Digitiphony but still with electro edges. I'll put up excerpts from the 2nd and 4th movements soon, hopefully, muse allowing.. I am not quite sure about how to approach the third movement yet, I want it to have a quirky, leftfield feel to offset against the rest of the piece.
For the tech-heads out there, I am creating this in Steinberg's Nuendo 4.3/XP, using a mixture of EWQL Symphonic Orchestra and Vienna Symphonic Library for the orchestral parts and, so far, Native Instruments' Absynth and Spectrasonics' Atmosphere for the electro elements. For the second and fourth movements I am also using EWQL's amazing Symphonic Choirs - initially on its own, but I will probably beef it up with some real voices at a later stage, as this always gives the best results, in my experience.
www.mldunn.net 2010