So finally tried making a classical piano song. . .

[bennyboy]

I have degrees in piano performance.  I like it.  Can I get a copy?
Elements of Bach in your primary section.  -- A tad repetitive, but if you play it live you can bring out the melody more and the triplets don't get grating.
Bits of Chopin in the middle.  You like your chromatics and flourishes!  Nice job.

Thanks so much.  I'm encouraged enough to comment about the style.

My "thing" is trying to use different genres as part of the musical vocabulary.  So some of the songs sound a little "off."  For example, the calmato  section sounds more like Debussy-- it feels a little out of context put right next to idiomatic Chopin writing.  And there are only a couple parts where there are actual chords with runs in parallel 3rds-- that's meant to be a little hint at Bach.

I think everyone was spot-on about the repetition in the first part.  It should be more pleasant with a proper performer, but it's also deliberately minimalistic-- when you finally get that Chopin bit, it's kind of "ahhh, finally something pleasant is happening." And this is where MIDI just fails horribly-- in a live performance, this part should be much more expressive-- tempo rubato and all that.

Anyway, thanks very much for your comments, I really got a lot of valuable feedback, and I feel really gratified right now!  Here's the score:

https://1drv.ms/b/s!AmUkXUwpI5Z2grleJ4N4w9N5cV92Vg

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Getting natural piano sound while using MIDI is quite tricky - any "real" instrument, really. It's almost impossible when using notation, which is designed to be interpreted and "humanized" by the performer. I imagine there might be plugins, which add some variation in velocity and timing, but I don't know for sure, especially that I have virtually no knowledge of Sibelius. I do know, however, that most modern sequencers have some options for adding human feel to programmed parts, as do some virtual instruments.

Yeah the actual performance is actually a WIP.  I'm pretty good at hand-editing notes to sound natural.  But this song has a LOT of notes!  I think it would take me about as much time to learn to play the piece, as to program it to sound played.  That doesn't mean it would be worth trying-- but yeah. . . it could very easily take more time to sequence it as it took me to write it.

I've done it in the past with violin, and it was MUCH easier just because of the reduced volume of notes you have to deal with.

Luckily for me, I live in Korea right now, and a local piano school director has found a top-notch student who wants to try and play it. Hopefully in a couple months, I'll have a live concert performance to link, and then I can die happy!

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I don’t know much about classical, but I thought that was pretty awesome!  Can you actually play that on a piano?

Thanks you so much!

I can play about 80% of it right now, with a fair amount of warm-up and if I'm having a good day mentally.  I'm thinking of recording it in parts and editing them together maybe, or cheating and playing them slowly and adjusting the volume by hand in MIDI.

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I'm no expert on classical music... my musical tastes are pretty much pick 'n' mix but I do like some of it, and where piano music is concerned I like Richard Clayderman and Rachmaninov... but that's about all I know. I thought your piece was pretty cool and reminds me much more of Rachmaninov than Clayderman... not just cos it's fast but also had a Rach feel about it at points. That's about all a philistine like me can say really ... well done for doing it anyway

To me, the Rach 2 and Rach 3 concertos are the pinnacle of piano writing.  You might get different, but I can't conceive of anything being better!