Christmas program music

[Sherry C]

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for the kind words

We had our first real rehearsal tonight, and it all went pretty well. I've got things set up where I'm running the whole thing - narration and the music - off my laptop hooked up to the sound system. I have a second monitor which duplicates my laptop monitor, and it's turned towards the kids. So, they can see the narration (if they need it - I'm encouraging them to memorize) and the songs as they play on Composer. I formatted a "Lyrics" part for each that has oversized lyrics along with the notes and I'm getting everything off the screen that is possible (eg. not showing Palettes and such) so that only the pertinent stuff shows.

Even though the kids weren't familiar at all with the music (they'd only heard it once a couple weeks ago) they were singing along fairly well with this set up. Having the lyrics and notes highlight as it plays is a great way to help them learn it, and to keep everyone together

I have some tweaking of the instruments to do while going through the sound system at church. I had things sounding pretty good here at home through my headphones, but there were a couple of violin parts at church tonight that sounded sort of like one of the camels had trodden on Herod's cat's tail I'll probably work around those peculiarities of that sound system this weekend.

ttfn,
Sherry

[Sherry C]

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

[dj]

Hi, Sherry:

Congrats. Sounds like a very enjoyable event.


And the new extensions for the Garritan Personal Orchestra sound exciting.

Merry Christmas.

David

[rrayner]

Hi Sherry,

Congratulations on the successful performance of your Christmas show. It must give you great pride to see the blossoming of young artists under your guidance. Keep up the good work. And Happy Holidays to you and your family.

Ralph

[Sherry C]

Hi Ralph,

Thanks! I owe a debt of gratitude to you for making your "learning" pieces available to help such as me when working with aspiring musicians

Merry Christmas to you and yours!
Sherry