The Blossoming Age (Traditional Chinese & MIDI Bass Drums)

This piece was composed during my first internship as a sound designer and a composer at China Focus LTD, a large culture promotion company located in Beijing. Aiming to compose a piece as the background music of a documentary film, which introduces a flourish era of time in the Ancient Chinese history, I wrote a MIDI piece involving a Guzheng, a set of Chinese Bass Drum, a piano, and a string orchestra.

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For the first version, while the piano was humanly played, the notes of the Guzheng and the Chinese Bass Drum was sampled from two existing recordings: "The Fish Boat in the Evening (渔舟唱晚)" performed by the Huaxia Chinese Orchestra, and "The Tiger at the Cattle Gate (牛门虎)" performed by B.C. Chinese Assocuation. With the use of Audacity, while the sound of the Bass Drum is somehow real and striking, the timbre of the Guzheng sounds a bit stiff; by inviting a professional Guzheng player to perform it out in the second version, the main melody became much more realistic.