Another rehearsal yesterday for the Morecambe performance, this time with full props. I think this is a lot of work for a short show, but Deb has a lot to remember and do, this is primarily for her benefit. For many performances I'll read from the music at least a bit, but this time I'm doing it all from memory to save the need to carry a music stand.
Today, recorded a few tracks for a song of Mike's, all good practice at the key of A. I then learned and re-notated 'Kingfisher's Handcup', which was pretty easy to play for the album but difficult to match live.
Then recorded the piano for 'Smile to Fall'. Prometheus can do a few unusual things, one is help with the timing of tracks like this. Recording a MIDI piano to metronome of say 120 B.P.M. is fine, but most actual playing is expressive and deliberately doesn't stick to a fixed metronome (in fact this is a curse of modern music, even my march of 'Women and Wives' is not strictly regular). As a consequence a recording will load into a sequencer and not line up right, some verses will be slower/longer than others, some beats longer or shorter, but this is 'correct', it's not something that should be or can be quantized because this expression is the whole point - but it creates a few problems when trying to line up other instruments; and of course it can't match the actual structure visually. Prometheus can import a pile of notes and treat these as a tempo guide, slowing or speeding up the player so that all of the notes line up and match the visual structure, thus giving a regular looking arrangement when the music moves at a different pace. I can also quantise notes to this 'expressive' metronome, some ticks of which might be half or double a regular tempo (if we're playing really romantically).
This is a huge help. It does mean, however, that I must play a guide version of the tune with one note per quarter-beat, the left hand marking time. I'd always need some sort of metronome. I could (and have before) hit a note repeatedly like drum-beat for this purpose. Well, 'Smile to Fall' is now recorded like this (the music is easy to play), and I've added a fretless bass and some strings, which are pretty but perhaps overkill for this simple song. It's a very gentle piano song, like an early Kate Bush song, or 'Is This The World We Created...?' by Freddie Mercury.
So, a musical day. More to do.
