Bytes for Two Trumpets

2 trumpets

I was asked to write a trumpet duet by my band director Mark Olson (though it took me so long to write it that it never got played). I asked him what it should be like; he said it should be fast, slow, a little Spanish, and probably a few other things. So I decided to experiment with a whole-tone scale. You'll notice I didn't stick to it, which is probably a good thing, but I also certainly never picked a key, and some of the motifs you'll hear are whole-tone-derived. This was also my first piece for a duet, so I had to learn how to work without full chords and not sound like Mozart. Not that I have anything against sounding like other composers, but I do have something against Mozart.

This recording is a bit different from the others in that it has somewhat realistic crescendi. Let me give some insight in the way this works. As I remarked above, Sibelius does not handle gradual dynamic changes during notes, only between them. There is a plugin that does that, though it's time-consuming to apply it (it has to be applied individually for each change, and various other MIDI things need to be set manually). Worse, the reverb function of Kontakt Player Gold does not obey those MIDI commands. So the only way is to save as MIDI (which loses some information sometimes), and use Synthfont, etc. This can't be done for band music, though, for various reasons which I don't feel like explaining, mostly having to do with the quality of the patches. So in the case of this piece, it's somewhat practical. There are kinks, though -- since I MIDI-controller-ized all dynamics, rapid changes don't sound very good. If you want to record a better version, perhaps with real trumpets, email me, but otherwise, this is the best I can do...

Oh, also, each trumpet plays in only one side. So if you have mono sound, you're missing out on the effect. If one of your stereo channels is muted, you'll only get one trumpet. I'd recommend (good) headphones for the best effect here.

Listen to Bytes for Two Trumpets (right-click to download)