Band Meetup - Sunday, Nov. 10

[Briallan]

Our next scheduled band meetup is on Sunday, Nov. 10 at the usual place. Siltharan is running a half-marathon that day, so may not attend. However, Brytford is planning on bringing along his latest girlfriend, and they seem to have met up with a dwarf minstrel who wants to come as well, so I think it's likely we will have enough bodies to test play 6-part songs (or more, depending of course on how many other characters can make it).

Since we have an upcoming concert on Friday Nov. 15, I would say that first priority order of business should be any issues we want to discuss or test relating to that concert. Next priority would be planning for any concerts we do between now and Yuletide Festival.

Does anyone have any interest in planning the next concert after our video-game music concert? I have enough 6-part rock songs already arranged for a half-hour concert, but I would be happy to defer to anyone else who has another idea they would like to pursue first -- I'm sure we'll have plenty of time to get to everything that everyone wants to do at some point in the next few months.

[Ice Weasel]

Rock would work between now and Holiday/Yule.  

Let's see if I can logic it out. USA Thanksgiving comes between now and then. In part, that celebrates the bounty the Native Americans shared with the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims came to America by ship, and landed on Plymouth ROCK! Yes!

Rock would fit, I think. 

[Hobbelion]

Your logic is impeccable. Don't forget Jingle Bell Rock.

Unfortunately I won't be able to make it. My brother is in town for a short time and we're planning a dinner that night. Could make it late at 9-10 PM Server Time, but no promises.

We should finalize the song list via forum and make sure we downloaded everything. We should also discuss the location of the concert as there's no fall festival anymore.

[Ice Weasel]

Hmm.. yeah, location-wise, the only odd "attraction" event is the Treasure Hunt.  It wouldn't work well to hold a concert there, as they force multiple layers, so each isn't too crowded for digging in the field. Lots of layers means not so many in each layer. Plus most will go there not to hang out, but to try to strike it rich. 

Shire is always popular, and there is a stage (the Methel Stage I think) in the fields, plus the Party Tree and the stage in the pub at Hobbiton. 

Bree always has heavy traffic, mainly around the Pony.  Lots of people play just outside the Pony, by the big rock. There is a stage, but people don't use it much for some reason, even though it was added just to accommodate concerts.

I would probably not do Thorins Hall, Thorin's Gate, or the Elf areas (Celondim and Duillond) because people don't tend to congregate there for RP.

[Siltharan]

Looks like I might be back in mid-to-late afternoon, but whether I hop on LOTRO is another story. Hoping to make it, though! I'll try to be prepared with songs. :)

[Briallan]

Reminder that Band Meetup is tonite at 9PM EST at Northern Lights kinship house. To recap this thread so far:

Hobbs and Silth may not be attending tonite. However, I can run 4 band member characters if necessary, so we may still be able to test 6-part songs if at least two other people show up besides myself.

Priority issues will be any testing and discussion for upcoming video game music concert this Friday. However, not sure if this will occur tonite due to potential absences -- if not, we can discuss other issues or test other arrangements.

Consensus so far is that the following concert would be a rock concert, and I will volunteer to organize it if no one else is interested in doing that (hint: this is your chance to volunteer if you are interested!). Here is a list of rock songs I've arranged that I think are performance-ready, so give them a listen and provide feedback. We can test some of them tonite if we have enough toons attending and don't have any other stuff to discuss or test.

Against the Wind
Beast of Burden
Brown eyed Girl
FreeBird
Hotel California (7-part, may try to get it down to 6 at some point)
Hurt So Good (pibgorn solo!!!)
I'm Looking Through You
Just what I Needed
Losing My Religion
Peace of Mind
Reaper (dont fear the reaper - blue oyster cult)
Smoke on the Water
Summertime Blues
This Magic Moment
Urgent
Wild Nights

These are all on my dropbox.

If anyone else has any songs to test or issues to discuss for tonite, you're of course welcome to either bring it up in advance on this thread or in-person at the meetup!

As usual :) anyone who has some level of interest in the band is welcome to attend: to participate, watch, ask questions or whatever.

[Hobbelion]

Sounds good about the Rock concert. I would like to contribute a U2 song if I can find a good midi.

If we do play Reaper, I must be on the Cowlbell!

[Briallan]

Urk ... no cowbell currently in my arrangement of Reaper .. however, I just played the ABC with cowbell replacing drum, and it sounded OK, so maybe we can accommodate you ... :)

Any U2 song in particular you were hunting for? While I'm a keen fan of classic rock, my knowledge of groups is a little spotty since I didn't really live thru that era ... though I've heard of Bono. U2's Wikipedia article has a clip of Sunday Bloody Sunday which sounded pretty good, so maybe I'll look into them further as well.

[Hobbelion]

Added an U2 song, Pride (in the name of love) in my dropbox. I think this is the best remediation, but I can supply the original if you think you could improve upon it. If you find a better MIDI, let me know too.

[Briallan]

The underlying midi seems fine to me, and the arrangement works well, I thought -- it gives a very ethereal effect by using the flute on the ostinato, since I don't think a live flute player could do that (at least, not easily)! I will probably tweak the volumes (in the ABC) when the clarinet first comes in, cause the lead gets a bit lost in the background, though it seems fine late in the song.

If you wanted a more 'rock' sound, we could swap in a bagpipe instead of the flute, but its really a matter of preference as to what kind of sound you want to go for -- that's what I love about the music system -- it has so many creative possibilities!

[Hobbelion]

Thanks Bri. I think I did experiment with the Bagpipes in place of the Flute, but went with the flute. As you point out, it gives it a more ethereal feeling and it is those type of U2 songs that I really like or rather the songs that U2 worked with Brian Eno on. Not sure he worked on Pride, but he did others.

If you want to change the volume, go ahead, but I'm just curious how you can do that on Maestro (if possible).

[Briallan]

You can't change the volume in Maestro, you have to either fix the midi itself, or (what I do) manually edit the ABC. In the ABC are volume indicators which are standard musical loudness notation indicators bracketed by a '+' character, so they look like:

+ppp+

+mp+

+mf+

+ffff+

 

etc.

You can either edit the ABC manually to fix parts of a song, or use Digero's online sound volume editor, where you paste an instrument part from the ABC into a textbox and raise or lower volume for the entire part at once.

[Ice Weasel]

Great find, Bri!

I've gone nuts trying to find all of the loudness cues in a file... I guess I could use an editor's "Find" feature, but manually is still a messy thing. And I always seem to miss some.

One of my biggest challenges (aside from no real piano or bowed strings available) is that one instrument drowns out others.

[Siltharan]

Thanks for finding that Digero tool! I've passed by a couple songs all because there are too many volume cues for an instrument and I don't want to manually change them all. :)