So these are some "symphonies" that I made. The first one I guess isn't actually a symphony, and I called it one kind of as a joke. The second one, however, is 20 minutes long and has three distinct movements, so I would feel more comfortable calling that one a symphony. I wrote both of them throughout March. I got feedback from various places (Reddit, etc.) that told me they were good, but worked best as background music. And of course, the scores to both are a mess because I really don't know how to properly write a score and I wanted to get the ideas out of my head as fast as possible.
For the first symphony, I had several melodies floating around in my head for literally months, and I finally sat down and put them into the computer. My organization consisted of putting each little melody into its own file as Melody 1, Melody 2, etc, and then I put them together in a certain order and then tied them together. Then I wrote the intro, with no regards to the other melodies. For the last movement, I wanted to hear what everything sounded like backwards because then maybe it would give me more ideas. I took what I had so far and went to a website that reverses midi files. Then I took the best parts of the reversed melodies, adding and taking away. The website screwed up some of the parts, erroneously making them into tuplets, but the way the tuplets interacted with each other sounded cool to me so I expanded on them.
I followed this same organizational pattern for the second symphony, but tried to expand on it. I didn't even really try to make it 20 minutes long, it just sort of happened that way. Some parts sound, to me, very much like the music to the video game series Mario Golf. Other parts are made up of musical ideas that I've actually had for years. For example, the sixteenth notes in the first movement at measure 49 were inspired by a musical idea that I came up with more than ten years ago. I was at an amusement park we have here in Pennsylvania called Hersheypark, and I was in line to ride the ferris wheel. The ferris wheel machinery had this sort of hum to it that sounded to me like the notes C and G, and it stuck with me all these years later until I finally used it in a musical piece. In the end, I decided to kind of have fun with the instrumentation, and not really pay attention to whether or not it could be performed by a real orchestra.
Here is a link to the first symphony, I posted on the MuseScore website: https://musescore.com/user/28260358/scores/5027048
Here is a link to the second symphony, I posted it on Youtube by screen capturing Musescore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb_uQ_1nEXQ
Replies
Welcome to the forum. I listened to the first piece. Thanks for posting this. I could tell even before I went to your page that you were a band geek. So was I. I played trumpet and was drum major.
A note on notation. For your purposes, you can write strings on a grand staff, but eventually you will want to give each section their own staff. MuseScore will let you add the instruction "pizz" to a staff so that you don't have to write a separate pizz staff.
Is there a cabasa sound? I don't think I could hear it.