Music Compositions of Philip Goddard — www.philipgoddard-music.co.uk

Equipment used in the recordings

'The Invisible Philharmonic Orchestra & Choir'

Hardware / Software currently used for playbacks, performances and recordings

Performances — not just playbacks

I transformed the computer playbacks into actual performances, albeit not in real time, by inserting into the sequencer files of the works masses of MIDI data to produce expression. This typically doubled, and in one or two cases even trebled, the file-size.

Please note that only by listening directly to my audio CDs or CD-quality downloads with good equipment would you hear the full quality of sound that this system produces. And only very good quality hi-fi speakers (sorry, not computer speakers) will reproduce the powerful depth of the organ and bass drum* sound in these recordings.

* Actually I have to put my hand up and own up to a grievous error in my making up the bass drum sounds, because at that time I didn't realize how deficient even my Castle Harlech floor-standing 'hi-fi' speakers were in reproduction of really low frequencies, so I thought the various bass drum samples I was using were deficient in those frequencies and thus needed boosting.

Thus, with a really good, monitor-quality hi-fi system now, with dedicated subwoofers and correction for room and speaker coloration of the bass, I was almost blown off my feet by various bass drum sounds in my recordings, because both their very low and their 'boomy' frequencies are considerably exaggerated and come out too loud in my recordings. That also has meant that I had to set the volume level for the overall sound considerably lower than I wanted for the CDs, which latter therefore would need to be played at 3dB or indeed 6dB above normal — the latter representing a doubling of the volume.

Much more recently, I found means to mitigate the strength of that bass drum overloading (using the VST plugin TDR Nova GE), so the issue is less marked now in all the recordings. Also, in 2020 I found that I could vastly improve clarity, depth and overall realism of the soundstage of every recording by using the soundfile editor Audacity to apply a tilt to the frequency spectrum of each recording (0dB change at 100Hz to +6dB at 8KHz).

That has made most of the cymbal sounds rather over-bright, but that's a small price to pay for such a huge improvement in overall sound quality (clarity, detail, depth, and general 'aliveness')

A Caution to anyone wanting to emulate my sounds

Happy I'd be if you were able to do so, but please don't imagine that you can simply go out and obtain the devices and samples that I used for my MIDI realizations, and straightaway get instrumental sounds as realistic or flexible as what I use; in fact you would be tremendously disappointed. Some time ago somebody emailed me to say that this had happened for him.

I had to put an enormous amount of time (and sometimes hair-tearing!) into customizing and debugging the samples to make them usable for my purposes. You can read more here about the various measures I had to take to achieve such relatively realistic results.

N.B. I'm not composing or making MIDI realizations nowadays, so the details given below are really in the past tense. I now have a Quiet PC NanoQube Fanless completely silent PC (strongly recommended), and got rid of the music hardware a long time ago, because it was taking up much-needed space in my small living room. My hi-fi system is nowadays a carefully chosen and configured monitor-quality setup complete with a pair of quality subwoofers, and set up to reproduce my natural soundscape recordings as faithfully as possible in a modest-size single-flat living room.

Also, since the original notes above were written, various digital audio workstations (DAWs), incorporating sequencers, come complete with much more lush and elaborate sets of sounds than I ever had access to, and even come with means to play using those sounds, and record them, all without using external recording hardware.

However, of all absurd things, there appears nowadays not to exist (at all!) a MIDI sequencer program that comes close to the long-defunct Voyetra Digital Orchestrator Pro sequencer in usability for classical composers, so it appears that I have no possibility of producing new recordings of my works with much better instrumental / choir sounds.

Score-writing programs appear all to have only primitive facilities for producing really life-like playbacks — their developers' / marketers' view generally being that for really good playback one needs a dedicated sequencer program (don't I know it!), rather than a score-writing program.

One ray of hope, however lies in the hugely transformational version 4 of MuseScore, once it's been upgraded with full MIDI sequencer functionality.

The Equipment

The original recordings were made way back in the early 2000s, so the specifications are very primitive compared with what could be done nowadays.

  • Computer, custom built by a local computer builder in Exeter, with AMD 2.6GHz processor, 512 MB main memory, 120 GB hard disk, and system silencing, making it the quietest PC I'd had since my old non-hard-disk Amstrad PC1512 in 1987, though still by no means silent. Operating system was Windows 98SE at the time of the final recordings of the works.

  • SoundBlaster Live soundcard with some 68 MB of instrument samples, mostly from the Sonido Soundfont CDs, but also including a cut-down customized version of the freeware pipe organ soundfont called 'Jeux', and I have a quality choir sound adapted from the sample CD entitled 'Peter Siedlaczeks' Classical Choir', but had to reduce each choir section to mono (Ugh!) to make usable samples because of quite severe memory limitations of the SB Live. For specifications of my virtual organ, click here.

  • Yamaha MU10XG sound module (the DB50XG daughterboard in a box)
    (please note that, contrary to the enthusiastic claims made by many for this device, all the orchestral sustaining instrument sounds in this module proved to be of too low a standard for me to use; I settled on using it only for certain tuned percussion, and certain synth sounds in Ascending — Nature's Way.)

  • E-mu Proteus 2 orchestral sound module, using custom presets only
    In my view the instrumental samples in this module were all too small to give decent sound quality, but I still had to use a fair number of them in order for the SoundBlaster Live memory limitation not to be exceeded. The string sections are each mono, and the bottom sample of the violins has a weird sound, as though perhaps it had been played sul ponticello or similar.

  • Midiman Flying Calf D/A converter, to minimize computer-induced interference in the Soundblaster's output

  • Zoom Studio 1202 reverb unit
    I used just two custom settings: one that gave the effect of a reasonably reverberant concert hall, and the other, a valiant attempt to configure the unit's 'plate' reverb setting to sound (somewhat) like cathedral reverb.

    A few of the works I recorded only with the faux-cathedral setting — which I regretted much more recently, because I was then stuck with that particular reverb for those works, and, although it did evoke a large space, it readily lost detail in the denser textures. On the other hand, a few other works I'd recorded in both concert-hall and faux-cathedral versions.

    In 2020 I did a very careful search for a really effective program (particularly VST plugin) that would enable me to add a much more cathedral-like reverb to appropriate recordings, and after a lot of searching and trying-out, a VST plugin called OrilRiver won hands down and really took me forward. I refer you to my relevant blog post (and scroll up to the following one too). Fortunately, the concert-hall reverb already in the recordings wasn't strong enough to interfere with the added cathedral reverb, and, to my ears the results are brilliant.

  • Mackie 1202 VLZ mixer

  • Digital Orchestrator Pro sequencer program (Voyetra)

  • Sibelius for Windows score-writing program

  • Philips CDR 870 CD recorder
    That was about the first model of domestic CD recorder, and a big and clunky thing it was, too! I had no facility enable me to record fully digitally. The sound all had to be taken from analogue outputs, and then the (analogue) signal then being fed into the Line In socket on the recorder.

  • Home playback through Arcam Alpha 8R amplifier and Castle Harlech speakers.
    The latter proved eventually to be a blight on the whole setup, because although they sounded very pleasing for general music listening, they were far from the necessary 'monitor' quality, resulting in my over-emphasizing the low bass of bass drums — something that I much more recently found means to alleviate to a fair extent in the recordings of my works.

For specifications of my virtual pipe organs, click here.

Look what one concert organiser in the U.S.A. had to say about the Composer's recordings:

…your MIDI realization techniques are superb. I have never heard PC realizations of works done so well (and in the course of my work I hear hundreds of MIDI tapes from composers.) As music director of the Invisible Philharmonic Orchestra, you do a fabulous job. What impresses me incredibly is that you have created all of these very major works without a notation package and just with a MIDI sequencer. — Carson P. Cooman (Concert organiser, Composer, Pianist, Organist), Rochester, NY

— And that was referring to my original recordings in the early 2000s.