Thanks to the trial version of Synful Orchestra, which I am currently evaluating, here is a version of the Fugue from The God Program (a work in progress), arranged for “String Quartet”.

There are 5 days remaining in my trial period and I’m still debating whether it is worth the money. Would it kick off a surge of musical inspiration? It might. That would be worth something.

With careful tweaking of MIDI data, Synful Orchestra is capable of landing pretty much in the uncanny valley of emulated instruments. It’s good – but it is not going to fool anyone and they might back away from the sound, saying “something doesn’t quite sound right here but I’m not sure what”.

Editor’s Note, August 2020: Alas, that version doesn’t seem to exist any more. I must have removed it during a clean-up. Sorry about that.
The final version of the fugue was attached to the beginning of the track “Head Crash” which I suggest checking out here: (Head Crash, from The Inevitable Obscenity of Autonomous Weaponry.)

Some works-in-progress:

• Playing With The Big Boys
• Future Imperfect
• Painting Abstracts

Both hi-fi and lo-fi versions of the files have been refreshed. 

I’d been listening to earlier versions off and on over the last month, at work, and I finally made some notes about what I didn’t like:

Abstracts, it turns out, was a much older version. I had completely forgotten that I’d already fixed many of the things I noticed. So the new version hasn’t had any recent work, but is a remix that I did a while ago but never refreshed on the web.

Future Imperfect. has been beefed up a little, with one instrument dropping out completely (no more Pipe Organ) and another returning in its place (subtle Melange strings).

Big Boys has has more radical work done: Thanks to a free VST plugin, TickyClav
from Big Tick Audio. This great little soft-synth (did I mention it was free?) picks one thing to do, and does it well. After playing around with it, I decided to replace the clav sound in Big Boys, and ended up recording a few new phrases, and removing some existing instrument tracks that were no longer needed. In the process, I also decided to re-balance some sections of the song with an eye to how this would sound if there were only one guitar player. So now, where before there
were clean guitar chords backing a lead guitar, the backing track is now being played on TickyClav.

Additionally, I re-recorded the brass section with a different, better sounding patch. And removed a second keyboard sound that was responding to the brass MIDI track. You really couldn’t tell it was there but it was muddying things up a little.

Just a quick couple of days work, but the 2008 versions of these two songs are much improved, I think.

Due to real life pushing its way into our scheduled fantasy, I have to pack up the Prodigal Sounds studio and I don’t know when or where I’ll get it back together. Hopefully not too far into the new year. I’ve made a push to finish up as much music as possible over the last few weeks, when time allows (which it doesn’t, really).

We’re moving to the San Francisco Bay Area.