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Andrew,
I would like to do Blue Christmas, but may I use a soprano recorder instead of the vocals, a tenor recorder for the bass, and an alto recorder for ear candy around the edges. I’m doing a bunch of these to learn how to play recorders and it’s tremendous fun. If you like, you can see examples on my youtube page.
Cheers,
BrianAndrew,
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. This was such a fun song to play and you’re a great teacher. Thank you.About the “swing.” I started working on it and relooked at the video of your teaching and realized that one of the purposes of learning this song was to teach us to put emotions into our playing. That’s something I need to work on, so I decided it’s best to concentrate on trying to put emotions into the song and not get distracted with swing (although I love swing music). I plan on trying to play a swing version of this song after Thanksgiving and see how it sounds. I’ll post it on this site somewhere if you’d like to see it?
Cheers,
BrianHere’s my entry for the November 2019 challenge. I thought I was doing ok until the end when I was apparently overcome with the desire to repeatedly play the wrong string. Unfortunately I can’t record again until after Thankshiving, so I figured I’d enter this and then replace it after Thanksgiving if I have time. It was a wonderful arrangement. Thanks for teaching it to us. That’s my 2nd favorite Elvis tune. My favorite is Return to Sender. Although it has a cool bass line so you have to use counterpoint they do for Bach’s Bourree
I AM A PREMIUM MEMBER
Wow, everyone is doing such a great job on these songs…wow. Congratulations, this is a great challenge. I do have a question though. I’ve been working on I Can’t Help Falling in Love and I decided to listen to the Elvae version so I could add dynamics and every swing detector I have went off. Someone in his band is swinging eigth notes. I’m not sure who. When I listen to the instruments individually they’re playing straight eigths, but when I listen to the whole band it swings. I’m not sure what’s happening, but it swings. The next time I played the song, I was swining eigth notes too. I’ve tried to stop, but the music won’t allow me to. Should I switch songs or am I allowed to swing the eigths?
That happens to me all the time too. I’m playing a song and a phrase reminds me of some other song, and I can’t get that other so g out of my head.
Andrew,
Thanks so much for your kind words and suggestions. I really appreciate the constructive criticism and the fact that you listened to the song so closely to be able to hear those things. Thank you. I will definitely work on all of them.I did hear the problem with the bass notes on the upper part of the neck that you mentioned, but I didn’t know what to do about them, but your suggestion worked. In the bass world we have the opposite problem. The bass is a “ringy” instrument and we’re alway working to make sure it doesn’t ring too long. But you’re definitely right, those bass notes sounded choked off, in a bad and distracting way. Thank you.
I can’t wait for November’s challenge to work on that arpeggio. That’s something I do on the bass guitar all the time (with the same inconsistency), I can’t wait to fix it. I know several pit orchestra conductors who will probably want to send you a thank you card for letting me know about this. 🙂 To be fair they’ve mentioned that to me before, but conductors say so many things, we can’t be expected to listen to all of their comments. 🙂
I tried to put those speed up and slow downs into the song as well as a volume difference between the accompaniment and the melody line, but I couldn’t make it work before I ran out of time. But I’m not done with this piece, I’m going to continue working on it to internalize all your suggestions as well as work on separating the melody line from the harmonization…that’s hard. Everytime I started making progress on it something else fell apart. Although some of the speed ups and slow downs kind of took care of themselves when I was experimenting with the volume…Say, do you plan on having a course on how to separate the melody line from the harmonization? That would be cool.
Thanks for all your help, I really appreciate it. RockClass101 rocks! Woo hoo!
Cheers,
Brian