"TOM SAWYER" - Huckleberry Finn enters

[rbowser-]

(click the picture for the MP3]
"ME AND MY BEST FRIEND"

The show's second lead finally enters - Huckleberry Finn. He's carrying a dead cat by the tail and wants to show it off to his buddy Tom Sawyer. They make plans to meet at the cemetery that night to cast a spell with the dead cat to rid Huck of his warts. Kids on their way to school gather around to hear Tom bragging about what smart little whippersnappers he and Huck are and an impromptu hoedown ensues.

Garritan instruments used in this demo:

JABB piano
--Harmonica (with Sonar wah-wah effect)
GPO Full strings
--1st strings
--Violas
--Cellos
--Basses
World fiddle
--Banjo
The Garritan Stradivari

Other sound sources are bass and drums.

Randy

[fastlane]

I enjoyed "Best Friend". Nice use of instruments and a few twists and turns to keep interest but not difficult to perform.

I loved the smarter- oughter rhyme. The harmonica sounds really cool.

This is shaping up to be a fun, wonderful musical.

Thanks for posting your work Randy.




Phil

[Tom_Davis]

(click the picture for the MP3]
"ME AND MY BEST FRIEND"

The show's second lead finally enters - Huckleberry Finn. He's carrying a dead cat by the tail and wants to show it off to his buddy Tom Sawyer. They make plans to meet at the cemetery that night to cast a spell with the dead cat to rid Huck of his warts. Kids on their way to school gather around to hear Tom bragging about what smart little whippersnappers he and Huck are and an impromptu hoedown ensues.

Garritan instruments used in this demo:

JABB piano
--Harmonica (with Sonar wah-wah effect)
GPO Full strings
--1st strings
--Violas
--Cellos
--Basses
World fiddle
--Banjo
The Garritan Stradivari

Other sound sources are bass and drums.

Randy

This is my 3rd attempt to post a reply. Every time I hit submit reply I get the message, "NS is not responding." I think this would be great fun to perform. Hmm - we have an opera house in town that hosted many vaudeville shows and musicals. An interesting thought.

[rbowser-]

I enjoyed "Best Friend". Nice use of instruments and a few twists and turns to keep interest but not difficult to perform.

I loved the smarter- oughter rhyme. The harmonica sounds really cool.

This is shaping up to be a fun, wonderful musical.

Thanks for posting your work Randy.




Phil

Hi, Phil- Thanks for the post. And thanks for pointing out that there is a bit of a musical surprise when there's a key shift for the B section. You know me, I Gotta add at least a little surprise now and then when the material otherwise has to otherwise be so simple.

"Smarter"--"Oughter"---hehe--I love that rhyme too. This was the first song I wrote for the show, and that was the first lyric that came up. It was one of those instant brainstorms that turns out to be a keeper.

The harmonica in JABB that I used is a perfectly good sample set, but the harmonica is a very difficult instrument to emulate. The wah-wah plug-in added some of the characteristic playing technique I wanted to suggest. It's not as if the harmonica track would stand on its own as a solo, but it's working fine in a mix, so the "Sawyer" tunes are sprinkled with bits of wah-wahed harmonica.

By the way, I'm not talking about auto wah, like a guitarist may use. I disengaged the auto trigger, and automated the controls, tying them to knobs on my controller keyboard. That way the Wah effect would always come in and last as long as I really wanted. I played that plug-in.

Thanks again!

Randy

[rbowser-]

... I think this would be great fun to perform. Hmm - we have an opera house in town that hosted many vaudeville shows and musicals. An interesting thought.

That certainly is an interesting thought, Tom! I don't know yet if the group that commissioned me to write this will actually be doing the show, so I'm wanting to have the show published so community and school groups can do it. But to be published, the show needs a first production - and those are not so easy to set up. SO--yes, a very interesting idea you brought up.

And I'm glad you think it'd be fun to perform. Naturally I feel it would be!

Randy

[Craig Reeves]

Randy, man, this is nice!

Your production methods are awesome! Glad to see a fellow SONAR user is getting along well with the garritan products.

I've been thinking about getting the World Instruments for some time, they're some of the best world instruments I've heard, and I've been waiting for Garritan to release a World Instruments library for years...

[rbowser-]

Randy, man, this is nice!

Your production methods are awesome! Glad to see a fellow SONAR user is getting along well with the garritan products.

I've been thinking about getting the World Instruments for some time, they're some of the best world instruments I've heard, and I've been waiting for Garritan to release a World Instruments library for years...

Thanks, Craig! I've been using all the Garritan Libraries with Sonar for years now, it's a superb set of tools, that combination.

Sounds like you Must get World, Craig, since it's what you've been waiting for. It was released over a year ago--you're behind the times--go get it!

Randy

[Plowking]

This is shaping up to be quite a show. Another great production - I still haven't opted for the World Instruments, but you make a good case for it with these authentic sounding songs.

They may sound simple musically, but production wise I see them as being really complex, which I mentioned before. There's a lot going on in that 'simple' music, and I wonder how many of us could program a banjo and a harmonica!

Harmonica's and strings - two of the hardest virtual instruments to get right

Great stuff, well done.

[rbowser-]

This is shaping up to be quite a show. Another great production - I still haven't opted for the World Instruments, but you make a good case for it with these authentic sounding songs.

They may sound simple musically, but production wise I see them as being really complex, which I mentioned before. There's a lot going on in that 'simple' music, and I wonder how many of us could program a banjo and a harmonica!

Harmonica's and strings - two of the hardest virtual instruments to get right

Great stuff, well done.

Hi, Graham - I love this post from you, thanks for it.

On my first couple of "Sawyer" threads I mentioned that I had hesitated to post these songs since they're so far afield from the more serious music usually posted. I anticipated regular visitors to not be interested in songs, and probably even reacting with a "What the...?" if they did listen. And that probably does describe the most common reactions to these posts, but that's OK.

I wanted to share what I've been up to, so went ahead and started putting these songs up a few months ago. For a long time I've encouraged people to post their work no matter what the genre, so I realized this was the opportunity to practice what I preach!

Working on those more difficult bits, like the banjo and harmonica you mentioned, was one of the most fun things about working on these tunes. I've never been a "just trigger the notes and hope the synth/sampler sounds good" type. For me, the whole point of recording music with software instruments is to dig in and work with them, trying to emulate the Real World instruments the sounds are based on. So working up the wah wah on the harmonica, listening to bluegrass tracks to understand the kind of licks used on a banjo - all that sort of thing is the most fun and challenging aspect of working up projects like this.

I started using synths back in the '80's. Even the best synth sounds then were abstractions, unrealistic approximations of what they were supposed to be sounding like. But there wasn't the expectation for those sounds to be convincingly "real" - and I think that was the strength, not the weakness of early synths. And part of the challenge of using those synths was to play them in an emulative way. You had a hollow sounding square wave, and it was your "clarinet." Using MIDI controllers and a playing style which was based on the way a clarinetist plays his instrument made for a result that was such an interesting blend of a purely electronic, yet somewhat organic sound - Nobody was fooled into thinking you were playing a clarinet, and that wasn't the point. But listeners could hear the "clarinet-like" performance in the track and recognize it for what it was.

And so on - There was something more pure about that era, before the drive came to be for a more and more natural sound. Now we're an era when musicians tend to be on the alert for "phony" sounds when they listen to music. "Ah that was synthy" "man what a crappy sample," reactions like that. It can seem like a pointless mad search for the Ultimate Samples which can bring people to be focused on the wrong thing - the tools rather than the actual music, the composition, the arrangement of notes.

But working with the old synths prepared me for the concept of trying to play each patch in a way that emulates the real thing, that's my main point. I can't imagine working on music with my computer without my keyboard, and all the tools in my software that I can get my hands on.

Thanks for the observation, Graham!

Randy

[Raymond62]

"Me and my best-friends" ..... Nice. It reminded me of some songs from Treemonisha (Scott Joplin). Really great! .. and that banjo!!! Loved it.

Raymond