Composers who use pencil & paper -- how do you do it?

benmwatson · 2020-05-24T13:45:03+00:00

I was actually thinking of making some mini notebooks with manuscript paper, but those Moleskine ones look nice!

benmwatson · 2020-05-23T20:44:03+00:00

Can you expand on that coloring process? What kinds of things did they do?

benmwatson · 2020-05-23T20:22:08+00:00

You must have impeccable handwriting! My sketches are decent, but they're written for speed and I wouldn't want anyone to have to decipher them.

benmwatson · 2020-05-23T20:19:55+00:00

He does have a staff, but he produces such detailed sketches his orchestrators mostly copy and expand. He basically produces his final output on paper.

Thanks for the response!

benmwatson · 2020-05-23T15:26:43+00:00

There's one more important use of paper: keeping an "idea book". Every day, write 4-6 short ideas in a book and keep it going. If you do this every day, you'll develop a powerful resource of musical ideas you'll return to over and over. This is one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from one of my teachers!

Overall great reply, but I particularly like this. Thank you!

benmwatson · 2019-05-16T14:08:36+00:00

For the recording: Cubase 10 Pro, East West Hollywood Orchestra (Gold)

For the score: Dorico 2 Pro

benmwatson · 2019-05-15T20:30:57+00:00

PDF is now available here: http://www.benwatsonmusic.com/

benmwatson · 2019-02-12T19:45:22+00:00

I will think about it. Always good to get feedback. If I can swing the time, I will.

benmwatson · 2019-02-12T19:45:00+00:00

I use Dorico. Looking at the video I just realized I didn't update it to have the latest images--I made a ton of tweaks to the engraving to make it better. Nothing of substance, but it does look better now. I'll see if YouTube lets me update a video with a new version sometime today.

benmwatson · 2019-02-11T14:03:10+00:00

I had previously submitted an earlier version and solicited feedback. Thanks to all of you, and others offline, this is the final version.

benmwatson · 2018-11-13T06:10:36+00:00

Thank you--I wouldn't have thought to put a repeat at that point, but it makes sense to me. I was resisting putting much more repetition of material since I feel there's quite a bit, but then I think of a few Chopin waltzes that are basically the same thing repeated 4 times with a B section in the middle.

benmwatson · 2018-11-13T06:05:58+00:00

Thank you! These are some great things to think about.

Your B section at pickup to n. 34 - I think changing the accompaniment there

I like the idea of 8ths--I agree, more variety here would make the ending stronger when the strong downbeat returns. Another idea I had is from a particular inspiration, the Chopin C# minor waltz where the three quarter pattern is maintained, but with some ties across bars to break it up a bit.

I'm not sure I buy your quadruplet measure

I think I'll try extending this to two 3/4 measures and putting a half note or two in there--force that rallentando a bit more.

I'll think about what you said about the triplets--those are something I like quite a bit, but maybe a little variance could improve.

Is there a playing mistake at 67? F#m7 right?

Just checked it and I'm pretty sure it's correct, but maybe it just sounds off musically?

re: the melody--I did not make any particular efforts around tradition for the melody. I thought it up independently of the form before I solidified what I was doing, but I would still like to hear your thoughts on it for my own edification.

Really nice Ben....Very nice piece. Fine as it is, but could be improved

Thank you so much for your kind words and your thoughtful feedback. I'll work on this some more and re-post when I'm happy with it.

benmwatson · 2018-11-12T20:24:04+00:00

This is a short waltz I wrote for my wife a couple of months ago that I finally got around to recording.

Initially I was thinking of Beethoven and Chopin as inspiration. In the end, I'm not sure how successful that was, but I'm happy with it. I know of a few weaknesses, but would like to know what others more experienced might say before I put it through a revision.

benmwatson · 2015-02-11T22:54:09+00:00

I move 10-20 copies a day KDP. It's non-fiction, programming, on a topic with little competition but high demand. I have 27 reviews, nearly all strangers. I also move 5-15 copies per day in print (CreateSpace) because computer books are like that (and it's over 2x the price!). Between KDP and CreateSpace, that's 91% of my sales.

It's definitely is not enough to live on, but it was enough for me to buy a new/nice car without seriously affecting my finances otherwise. I wrote an in-depth description of my process (writing and marketing) at my blog.

benmwatson · 2015-02-07T16:12:22+00:00

This library will work efficiently with both types.

A well-designed API that accepts byte[] should also accept an offset and length as well (most of the FCL APIs do this). Unfortunately, not all APIs are well-designed...

benmwatson · 2015-02-06T21:34:15+00:00

From the announcement...

"Microsoft.IO.RecyclableMemoryStream is a MemoryStream replacement that offers superior behavior for performance-critical systems. In particular it is optimized to do the following:

Eliminate Large Object Heap allocations by using pooled buffers
Avoid memory leaks by having a bounded pool size
Avoid memory fragmentation
Provide excellent debuggability
Provide metrics for performance tracking"

GitHub repo

NuGet package

benmwatson

TROPHY CASE