well, you get what you want...

> Actually, I would be interested on how YOU develop a piece of music, and how
> you work with your own program MSG and how you incorperate it into your
> sequencer program, which I presume is Cubase.

i still use notator 3.21 on my atari and logic audio platinum on my pc. i tried
cubase, but it has a major flaw - i need *long* drones, and cubase stops any
drone after some 85 bars as the note length is stored in two bytes only.

working with msg is different from working with notator. msg is my playground
where i try a lot of things out. astonishing things can happen - one of my
pieces grounds on a lissajous sequence in c minor, spread over two octaves or
so. it turned out that its center pitch was f, not c. so it became mixolydic
with a c as upper and lower limit. it sounds quite unusual (it will be included
on my forthcoming first cd).

one session with msg yields typically 3 to 10 midi files.

later, i load those midi files at random into the sequencer. sometimes i find a
sound that fits and i start developing it by playing along, or adding another
midi file! this way, one out of three sessions sees me saving a fragment. one
out of five sessions develops into a whole piece. one out of two pieces i find
worth listening to.

sometimes i work with msg having a special need. i remember that i wanted to
start a piece with about ten minutes of rising 1/16 arpeggios, each  arpeggio
different in length (similar but never the same - *fractal*). it would have been
a hell of a job to do it by hand - msg did it in five minutes, without any of
the cliches i would have added.

i want to point out that i use msg as a TOOL. msg sequences are 'sine qua non'
in the background. what holds a piece together is *always* my
invention/intuition, controlled by mind and played by hand.

hellmuth