Jazz Ballad

Howdy Fred,

Great piece! I really like the contrasting lead-in with just the piano and occasional bass.

I had some problems with stuck notes for the acoustic bass, though, so I tried using the pizzicato strings, and that sounded really nice and "woody" (I'm using my Chaos soundfont bank), which I thought went particularly well.

Dare I ask? .... Have you worked this up with JABB or GPO? I might give it a try with GPO and see what that sounds like - the muted trumpet on my Chaos (while much better than my soundcard's FM sounds) doesn't do the part justice by a mile, I'm sure.

I'm sure this piece is powerful for you in more ways than one right now. Hang in there, guy, and know that lots of folks are praying for Patsy and you.

glr,
Sherry

Hi Fred,

This is nice, really nice. I had it playing in Win Med Player with repeat while I read mail, but before that I had to check it out in Composer to make sure it was a .mid file. Midi just doesn't have such living presence, as RCA used to say about Orthophonic High Fidelity. I still don't know how you did it, entirely. You've done a lot of work with the pedal and must have spent hours working on note velocity, attack and release. But it was worth it. This is a lovely arrangement and it does, indeed, sound very live. I still can't figure out how you got vibrato from the GM muted trumpet. Did you edit the preset in Vienna or something? Nice going, anyhow. Ditto on the pitch bends, with which I've still had nothing but disaster.

Why does "it was 3:00 a.m. and the police chased us" ring such a bell?

best to you and Patsy,
mgj

Hi Fred,

I should have known that your keyboard was involved in "Spring." It is a powerful argument for getting one and hooking it up to my computer...once I have figured how to do it without moving it to the basement and re-wiring everything or adding a room to keep it within hailing distance of the machine.

Regarding vibrato: Do you do that from your keyboard, too? It is pretty hard to envision playing and handling a mod wheel too, so thinking you might have done it in Composer with the graph over notes palette, I experimented a bit. I was surprised and delighted to find that I could get vibrato from a GM violin. I also tried a flute and clarinet and horn. Really nice. I guess I was surprised because I had experimented with this feature before and didn't find any of the controls that made a difference. I guess I just tried the wrong ones.

Middle of the night and police chasing rang a bell because of a literary, rather than musical, session in and through the town adjoining the college campus, 46 years ago. It was mostly declaiming Shakespeare as we, my roomate and I, dragged a long chain borrowed from a construction site through sleeping neighborhoods, pausing now and again to revisit a condensed Thunderbird. There was also some music, as I now recall--written by Oscar Brand, and never sung so badly by him or anyone else. (Even the thought of that Thunderbird, now, requires a Zantac.)

I suspect your wee hours jam session didn't deserve being chased by police. Quite the opposite of mine.

all best,
mgj