stefkeB

On may 26th, we played our arrangement of "Concerning Hobbits", during the wedding ceremony of my sister in law.
It was not perfect, but everyone was so delighted to hear it. We surely made a good impression.
I've also played the Harry Sacksioni arrangement of "Here Comes the Sun" from George Harrison and got good comments about it (although I did play some slight errors).
You can hear a recording of our rehearsal.

Moby has a heart for people with no budget, or so it seems...When you go to http://gratis.moby.com/film-music.html you can register and download free (moby) music to include in a non-commercial project. Seems reasonably fair and can be beneficial for both parties.Let's just hope that there is enough variation that not all new movies will have the same soundtrack. 

With the Sales day of our local music shop (Leo Caerts in Leuven), I went to buy a decent microphone. The one I have, the Sure SM58 is fine, but is more meant for live-work or for harsh sounds (e.g. drums). They suggested an MXL and I went with the Desktop Recording Kit (http://www.mxlmics.com/Comp_Recording/comprecord_index.html). It was about €100 and included the microphone, the cables, a small microphone stand and a carrier box.I did a short test and noticed a world of difference:

My sister in law will get married in may 2007 and she asked a friend if she could prepare "Concerning Hobbits" by Howard Shore, from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack.As a result, she mail around to find help and we are preparing our first repetition.

Last month has been busy: our youngest son, Jonas, was born, we've moved from our appartment to a house and our second son, Wannes, went to school for the first time. The result: my guitars are still not unpacked... But the urge for playing is rising, so there has to be a point where I restart my musical projects. Promise.

I'm investigating (again) a good approach to create scores. I have so many small scribbles and compositions, which have their own distinct look on paper, but I want to eventually digitise them as real scores.

I have been trying some basic score layouting with Cubase SE from Steinberg, which gives only basic control.

One of my friends from a local stageplay asked me to play guitar at his upcoming wedding. I am flattered and still breeding on ideas as to what is suitable to play.

I found out last weekend by playing CD's at the break of a stageplay can badly expose the public to wide volume variety...

Since I have been using Ableton Live (http://www.ableton.com), I am slowly learning many things I didn't know how to do before. One of the mysteries to me is how DJs are able to make smooth transitions between unrelated songs. Beats and pitch can differ, but somehow they manage to mix them together. I still don't know how they do this with turntables or CD's, but at least I now know how I can do this in Live.

I have switched to Ableton Live in the summer of 2006. I was a devoted Cubase user before, but the realtime arrangment features of Live are very compelling. Live is very strong in working with loops in audio and MIDI, for which I preferred ACID over Cubase anyway. And Live has most of the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) features of Cubase as well, including support for audio effect, MIDI effects, software instruments and VST plugins and Audio Units (at least, on the OSX version).