Following on from The Dice Man, Baby - I've produced a version of Terry Riley's seminal minimalist work - "In C".

In 1964 Terry Riley wrote a set of "performing directions" or instructions alongside 53 short melodic fragments of music. Musicians were advised to go through the fragments in the order as set out, playing each as many times as they wanted before moving onto the next. The fragments are of varying lengths so the musicians inevitably get out of step with each other.

Riley's instructions were for the musicians to listen very carefully to what the other musicians were playing, and to try to stay within two or three fragments of each other (which is difficult enough because some fragments are far longer than others). The objective is to have an ever changing pattern that is never replicated - but when musicians hit upon something that sounds good, they can keep repeating it until they decide to move on.

Creating the performance electronically I didn't have that performers ear, so I used my dice again. Each fragment got the role of a four sided die to determine the number of repetitions, and each instrument is different, at times creating chaos, but always with some resolution as instruments catch up or move onto a more fitting fragment.

In some places the die just didn't work, or I wanted to ignore it for the sake of the piece - so I did.

Riley suggested about 35 musicians would be ideal. I've kept it to 16 instruments.

He also suggested a high pitched pulse could be included - as the first thing the listener hears, and the last - keeping a steady monotonous rhythm all the way through - it helps the musicians keep in time. I decided to include it, even though I didn't need help to keep in time because it's automatically in time when working with digital music.

The whole piece, when played by an orchestra or group of musicians usually takes about an hour - can be less, but can be quite a bit longer. I've kept this version to eight minutes, partly because nobody will ever listen to it to the end anyway (though I do recommend watching some of the full orchestral versions on youtube).

This is my first version - using midis based on actual instruments rather than synth sounds. In the future I'm going to try using synths to see what happens.