I've been working on a project arranging selected Christmas Carols for viols over the past few years, and thought I'd share some of them with you as a way of wishing everyone a Merry Christmas. They are here:
http://dfenton.com/Carols/ Of course, my broken-down little computer with it's ancient Turtle Beach synthesizer doesn't have very good orchestral strings, so you'll have to put up with the annoying messa da voce swell on each note, but that's the best I can do. Anyway, some comments: 1. all were originally arranged for viols and I haven't re-arranged them to be appropriately voiced for strings. So, if you're wondering why the violas sound like they are where the second violins ought to be or, why the cellos sound like they are where the violas ought to be, it's because the ranges for viols don't match too well with the orchestral sections. If I were to actually arrange them for strings (instead of just play back viol arrangements through an orchestra patch) I'd obviously change all of those. 2. yes, Virginia, that's parallel 5ths at the end of Silent Night. I don't care. 3. I haven't worked very hard on these performances in terms of trying to making them "human" sounding. That means that some of the things I did do are a bit infelicitous (if I were to do it over again, I'd make some of the accents in the plainchant Divinum Mysterium less overt; and that swell into the full statement near the end of Bleak Midwinter would be a little less crass). 4. yes there's a couple of glitches in some of them. The glitches weren't in the raw WAV output but somehow processing for reverb caused the glitches to come out. 5. it's remarkable how much is lost with conversion to MP3, even when the source is just a simple synthesized string section. So, I've saved as 256 instead of my usual 192. It made for longer uploads, but the difference in sound was pretty large. 6. I amused myself a great deal with faking a large pipe organ in the Es ist ein' Ros' variations. As with all electronic imitations of a pipe organ, it's the solo stops that are more successful, and full organ doesn't sound so good. I have never been happy with the results of the last two variations (particularly the final one), but I didn't redo this for this Christmas. I also giggle whenever I look at the actual instrument lists, with pan flute and ocarina for two of the solo stops and piccolo for the pedal! It's amazing what kind of weird sounds you can get by using a simple sample outside its intended range. For the Es ist ein' Ros' if you're interested you can look at the original score, and the score of the organ version, as well the MIDI versions of both here: http://www.dfenton.com/Rose/ I hope you enjoy listening to these, as I've had much fun creating the arrangements. There are actually 6 more planned! Oh, also, my viol consort has begun a recording project with an NYU student. He's doing a 5-channel surround-sound recording of our 5- part consort. We did a test in early December, and here's a first stereo mix of the results: http://www.dfenton.com/Collegium/NewRecording/Jenkins-Fantasy3.mp3 As we didn't know the piece very well and had one member who was deathly ill, it was something of a rocky session, but the recording is pretty good for us. I'm proud of it, at least. Maybe you'll enjoy it, too. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
