I guess it isn't really blues, but it's me playing :^)
feel free to rip it to shreds, I know there a couple of glitches in it.
first time I've used soundcloud so this might not work.
The backing track I worked out on Band in a Box, the melody is played on a CX12 tenor tuned. I put them both into my Roland street cube with some reverb and chorus on the harp and recorded the output from the headphone socket to my minidisk recorder then I played the minidisk into the laptop into audacity and exported as mp3. Rather convoluted, but the inputs don't work properly on this laptop, it's a known bug with linux and the Acer laptop.
does that play for anyone else? for me it needs a lpugin that it can't find :^( http://soundcloud.com/robin-shaw-1/for-a-few-dollars-more works via facecloth.
---------- "Come on Brackett let's get changed"
Last Edited by on May 14, 2012 2:31 PM
I might play the harp effect cleaner and the bass with more echo. I might bring the strange noises in the back ground up a bit, maybe pan them back and forth left right to create a sort of warbly thing. Needs to be longer too! :)
and hold the chicken foot in your left hand....Firefox wants more plugins that it can't find but Nate's embedding works. ---------- MBH Webbrain - a GUI guide to Adam's Youtube vids FerretCat Webbrain - Jason Ricci's vids (by hair colour!)
@ Nate thanks for re-embedding. I hadn't spotted the 'share' link and just used the instructions for embedding an audio file from the forum 'how to'.
If I was doing this in a studio or even just multi tracking I might be able to do all that, but the bass was straight out of band in a box with no effects at all. I had no option to pan anything.
What would be your suggestion for making it longer. Just repeating the same chorus over and over? This is a problem I have with playing solo harp, how to make it interesting once I have played the tune through once [or possibly twice].
At least I left you wanting more :^)
I need to get the old laptop up and running again to do some multitrack recording ---------- "Come on Brackett let's get changed"
I have the same problem when I try to make stuff longer too. I'm on my way out the door to an open mic, but I'll give it a listen again later and see if I get any ideas. Repetition with variation. :)
Listening again, breaking it down, you have 3 repetitions of 2 basic parts.
The first part breaks down into 2 repetitions of the same line, from 6 secs to about 27 secs, then the next part goes to about 47 seconds. That's the first 'repetition'. You do basically the same thing two more times. If I was mapping it out I might call it:
a/a/b a/a/b a/a/b
So, how to stretch it, or make it sound like it has more parts? (I offer all this advice as someone who struggles with this all the time!) Maybe you could more the 3rd 'b' section to a different octave? I've got a version of 'When the Saints Go Marching In' that me and my guitar player played just goofing around where I moved the pattern around to different spots on the harmonica, which, since harps are laid out all crazy like they are, moved the melody from mode to mode. Parts of it sounded minor, other parts major, other parts just higher or lower, some parts like music you'd expect to hear playing on concertinas at French sidewalk cafes. That's one idea. I know in some forms of classical they would play the themes backwards or with all the intervals inverted (so if you would normally go up a third you'd instead go down a third). That's complicated stuff though. I've never been able to pull that off. Some chords might make the sections sound more different. I've got a tune I play that repeats two themes back and forth repeatedly, but the last time through I throw in tongue blocked octave (or at least I think they are octaves, I haven't actually sat down and figured out if I've got my tongue in the right position on each note, but it's parallel movement of some sort. It creates a sound like the music is building to something. I just don't know what yet!
You can also hear me moving the melody line from octave to octave. At one point I also do sort of a stripped down version of the melody where I delete some of the notes. There are some spots where I fell off the beat; it was a live performance. I need to sit down and rerecord this without the mistakes, but I think it's a good example of taking two short parts and making them sound longer. (Of course, in actual time, my song is shorter than yours, but the point is just to give you some ideas for what you can do with your melody.) Another technique, certainly not a particularly scientific one, is to add a part where you deliberately play a note way out of the melodic idea you have and see if you can work your way back to the original theme. Most of the time when I do this it's just because I goofed, but I often find that once I've hit a 'wrong' note I can hear the notes I need to play to make it resolve and sound right again. Sometimes it ends up sounding pretty good, sometimes, not so much.
