Brother Patrick and the Celts

[Sherry C]

Howdy,

I just returned yesterday from a few days away. My sons were all at church camp, and we stay in a trailer that is on the grounds, with no internet nor cell phone connectivity there. What did Mom do all that time? Played music for a big part of it I've been trying to improve my "improv" skills, using Composer some for that, but I branched out a little with some original music of mine.

I had previously worked up a piece on mandocello that I've performed as a solo instrument. But I've always heard it with whistle and bodhran in my head. So while I was at camp, I recorded the mandocello part, and then improvised the whistle part in an overdub. I didn't have my bodhran with me, but I then thought it would be pretty cool to have some fretless bass in there. So I improvised an overdubbed track with my fretless. I was actually pretty happy with how it turned out, so I've put it up on my SoundClick page.

I know this is sort of cheating because I don't have a .not file to offer so you can see how the tune goes. I have the Melodyne Editor, and one of my hopes has been that I could take something like the individual tracks that I recorded, get MIDI files from them in Melodyne, and then bring those into Composer to get a score. I haven't been able to do it yet, but I may just not have tweaked the right settings.

I could pretty easily (now) enter the whistle and bass into Composer, but getting the strum performance of a mandocello to sound authentic would take a fair bit of work (4x2 strings, emphases on different strings for different parts, strum patterns, etc.). I actually have started on that, and continued to add bits a time or two, but get sidetracked with other responsibilities. So until I can get it done in Composer and give you a "cleaner" performance file, you're stuck with the live version if you want to hear it. (www.soundclick.com/beanfield_castle) Comments are still welcome, as I'm trying to work on my compositional skills as well.

ttfn,
Sherry