Howdy,
Well, we pulled it off
Sunday's Christmas Celebration went very well. My son Josh made his violin debut, with another son Tom on drums and me on pennywhistle (we did a nice celtic-feeling rendition of "I Saw Three Ships" as a prelude). We've got a lot of kids at church that are starting to learn to play various instruments, and I've been trying to work with all of them to have some performance pieces for church (and elsewhere) so it's been pretty hectic here for the last month or so.
For the musical (titled "If We Could Talk With the Animals") the kids did a great job, especially with only four real practices that we had for all five songs. I set up a dual monitor (as described previously) with my laptop to use as a prompter for them, and that worked quite nicely. I played the songs directly from Composer using some soundfonts and Garritan Personal Orchestra instruments, using Tracktion 3 as the "tie it all together" VST host. The kids made the animal masks using foam board which they painted (I made holding sticks, and we did "Chinese opera" style
) to go with the characters for each song. They all did well with their narrative parts. We had a very enthusiastic response from the rest of the folks there
I did end up tweaking the songs somewhat from the originals that I posted previously. Some was the lyrics or notes, but a lot of that tweaking was performance-related, especially in regard to the GPO instruments as they sounded over our (not so hot) sound system at the church. I got lots of really nice compliments about the sound tracks.
I've since acquired both the Garritan World Instruments library (Christmas from my Mom and Dad) and the Jazz and Big Band library (from my mother in law). I'm pretty stoked about working with these new sound libraries for future tracks. I've even found that I can convert the sf2 soundfonts that I have into sfz format, which will work in the Aria player. Doing that, I can have some really interesting pads that I've found go along with some excellent "real" instruments, all in one easy to manipulate player. Very cool indeed
Merry Christmas folks!
Sherry