Monday, January 26, 1998 (Continued from the previous page)
I decided to evaluate the song one last time before declaring it a masterpiece. The ending, which I hadn't paid much attention to, didn't seem quite right. The primary key of the song is F# minor but it jumps back and forth between D major 7 and C# sus4. The ending, however was in vVI (D major 7). Theoretically, this is not necessarily a problem, but it sounded kind of weird. I changed the ending to F# sus4, which made the piece sound more integrated and neat.

Tuesday, January 27, 1998
I continued to go over the two pieces that I had been working on, over and over again. They were pretty much done except for some melody changes that I wanted to make. I was going through the manual to check some things and just then, I suddenly became enlightened to the world of VL. Through VL, I realized that I would be able to dramatically change the tones and phrasing of the music. That same instant, the first song came back to me. Amazingly, I had never used the VL voice parameter so the song was essentially made up of simple VL voices and Insertion Effects without taking advantage of the VL's true capabilities. The music itself might be very good as it is, but what is the point of having this technology if you don't take advantage of it?

*** My eyes are open now. I have seen the light.

I decided to work on the embouchure and tonguing. It can get confusing to handle too many parameters at one time so I tried to concentrate on just these two. I assigned an Emb CC number to No. 20 and a Tng CC number to No. 21. These settings were made off the cuff and were kind of a mess. I would have to go back and fix the EmbCtrlDept and TngCtrlDept settings.

Went back to the sequencer window and re-entered No. 20 and No. 21 as continuous. It was still a bit strange. My next attempt was done imagining how the song should be played. Embouchure and tonguing were integrated with the song phrases and the ranges of the instruments. Subtle expressions such as sub-tones and harmonics seemed to be coming together. I should have been employing these techniques from the beginning. From the ashes of that first song, it seemed that I had resurrected something workable.

Thursday, January 28, 1998
Next, I ran the data through the XG Checker. I ignored all of the errors that are related to Program Change and Bank Select. I also checked for multiple notes and polyphony. Although I only used the XG Checker as a guideline for checking polyphony, I did come across a place where 66 elements were used.

I checked the data several times making minor modifications and changing release velocity settings. The Control Change density was kind of high, so I lowered it a little. This is an essential process to avoid MIDI traffic overflow.

It was finally time to send the data to Tokyo. Which leaves me kind of short on material to add to this diary...

As we come to some of my final entries into this diary, let me give you just a few more of my lessons learned.

Session 1 | Session 2 | Session 3 | Session 4 | Session 6

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