Glenn NK wrote:I'm listening to Beethoven's Pathetique (cantabile movement). Very interesting hearing this does by a jazz pianist after hearing it so often in the classical style.
Glenn
PS - I'm really awaiting to see what Joe Felice would say if and when he tries this piece out (he's a classical pianist by training). It seems to me that Doug McKenzie is too.
You rang????
I have not yet heard the aforementioned Pathetique file, but rather than trying to copy it, here is a slightly different submittal for your approval.
Please have a listen to my version of Gershwin's "A Foggy Day in London Town" at the following URL:
http://www.mediafire.com/?nitczhtfaii
This particular mp3 exceeds Pianoteq's 10MB limit, so it is made available to you via Mediafire.com. As with my Variations on Jingle Bells file, this Gershwin piece was arranged and performed (this time in multitrack midi) by Yours Truly more than decade before Pianoteq became available.
I started working on this in an (unsuccessful) attempt to become a Roland performing artist, back in 1995. At the time, I had acquired a JV-1080 sound module that had a whopping 64MB (not GB) worth of ROM (read-only memory) sounds, and a total polyphony of an equally whopping 64 simultaneous voices.
This particular arrangement took me perhaps 3 or 4 months to work up. It was designed to put the JV-1080 through its paces in a 16-track performance. Since there are far more voices than are allowed by 16 simultaneous tracks, I made very, very extensive use of program changes. Everything you hear in the mp3 was done via midi sequence in real time through the 1080, including panning, pitch bends and reverb -- there is no audio rendering and no third-party processing going on here.
Many of the sounds you hear, especially the soaring solo trumpet line at approximately 4:00 were from "static" sounds. I made great use of pitchbend, volume and expression edits to enable the instruments to sound plausible.
Surely, the sound is dated, but we are talking about sounds from fifteen years ago. Thinking back, this was done on my Macintosh computer of only 4MB of RAM, an 80 meg hard drive and an ancient 25 Megahertz (1MHz = one thousandth of 1GHz) Motorola 68030 series microprocesser. The sounds were purely from this Roland hardware sound module. I used MOTU "Performer", the MIDI-only software precursor to "Digital Performer".
A bit of explanation of my arrangement is in order:
Because of the title, "A Foggy Day in London Town", the piece begins with the ringing of Big Ben -- from a custom patch by playing chimes that were pitch bent some three octaves (36 half steps) low, and making use of multi-tap delays and multi panning in the JV-1080.
The idea is that the listener is walking around London, and by chance walks into a pub wherein a lone pianist is plunking out the Gershwin tune one note at a time. Please note the intentional clash between the pianist's rhythm who is totally oblivious to Big Ben's chiming of 10PM.
As the pianist is going along (the JV-1080's piano was absolutely horrible sounding by today's standards), in comes a double bass player who takes up the melody. The pianist assumes the accompanist position to the bass line.
Then, out of nowhere, the curtain goes up, and behind the pianist and bassist is a complete jazz band, with saxes and woodwinds panned left, and brasses panned right.
Between full bigband reprises of the chorus and bridge come a series of solo excursions that include clarinet, trombone, trumpet, piano and vibes, and duets between various soloists, all interspersed with some key changes. By the way, all of the percussion drum sounds were from single notes flown in one-at-a-time -- no loops, here. In fact, if you listen closely, I kept changing the rhythm patterns to keep them from sounding too mechanical or boring in nature.
The hardest part for me in arranging this piece was how to end the darned thing. Finally, in an act of sheer desparation, I suddenly switched to the ending of Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" theme song, in order to bring about a suitable close to this arrangement.
As you listen to this piece, please again be aware this was done some fifteen years ago on a hardware sound module that had only 64 total voices of polyphony and several hundred sounds crammed into 64MB of ROM. I hope you enjoy.
This was not submitted before now, because -- with due consideration to Niclas and Guillaume -- this IS the Pianoteq forum, not the Joe Felice forum. I was rising to the challenge of "... what might Felice do with a jazz setting?"
TO: Niclas and Guillaume, I recently acquired some good-sounding Big Band Jazz sampling software, and sincerely intend to redo this arrangement with Pianoteq prominently featured in the solo piano part. This particular thread came up before I had a chance to do it in Pianoteq. You will be very proud of your modeling software when this re-recorded arrangement gets posted here.
Cheers to all,
Joe
Last edited by jcfelice88keys (03-01-2010 00:57)
