Sounds like you had great fun putting this together. 

Regards,
Randy Klumph
The National Consortium on Deaf-Blindness
The Teaching Research Institute
Western Oregon University
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----- Original Message -----
> On Dec 17, 2009, at 8:46 PM, Eric Thomas wrote:
> 
> > A few months ago we were toying with the idea of making some kind of 
> musical feature for the release of 16.0, which quickly turned into a 
> feature for our traditional New Year electronic postcard given the 
> 16.0 release calendar. This has been a lot of fun, and a lot of stress 
> too :-), but a lot of fun nonetheless! Most of us had never performed 
> in public or recorded ourselves before, let alone with studio-grade 
> microphones where you can hear every little flaw, and I have to say 
> that it was quite a shock the first time! You might think that you 
> have at least some kind of very basic idea about what you are doing, 
> but when you listen to yourself for the first time, well you just want 
> to run away as quickly as possible, but not before having thoroughly 
> reformatted the media containing that recording ;-) There is 
> supposedly a saying in the music industry, "we'll fix it in the mix," 
> but in this particular case the person wearing the sound engineer hat 
> (me) had never mixed any music before, knew next to nothing about 
> music theory, and only had a basic software package at his disposal. 
> So we all went into this knowing that any flaws we recorded would be 
> there to stay, and we would just have to live with it. Then one day at 
> around 4pm, we realized in horror that the instrument players were 
> about to go on vacation, meaning we were not going to have any 
> accompaniment for the vocals. "You are going to record the songs a 
> cappella??? Are you out of your mind???" ;-) We got instrumental 
> tracks literally at the last minute for two of the songs, and that's 
> the best we could do without impacting the 16.0 release, which of 
> course was our first priority.
> > 
> > As we cannot hope to compete with professional performances, we 
> decided to go for a different style than the traditional performances. 
> Going from left to right on the New Year card, the songs are:
> > 
> > 1. En etsi valtaa loistoa ("I seek not power, glory nor gold") by 
> Jean Sibelius
> > 
> >   This is a traditional church choir that I tried to mix in a 
> Gregorian style and turned into a duo. I hope I won't offend anyone in 
> Finland :-), but the thing is that I don't speak Finnish and I can 
> only listen so long to a choir in a foreign language before my 
> attention starts drifting away. I think the lead vocals make the piece 
> more interesting if you don't understand the language. What I like 
> with this piece is that I hear something different in the background 
> every time I play it.
> > 
> > 2. Stille Nacht (Silent Night)
> > 
> >   We decided early during the project that we would perform 
> international Christmas songs in their original language, in this case 
> German. It seems that it is usually sung as high as you are able to 
> go, plus one semitone ;-) Instead, we decided to go for a darker 
> version (and as the performer said, "We need to test the new 
> conference room subwoofer anyway!" :-) ). This track can sound pretty 
> dull on small desktop speakers though, it works best if you play it in 
> a living room and turn up the volume. Actually this is probably true 
> of all the tracks as I did the final check-up in my living room.
> > 
> > 3. Minuit chrétiens (O Holy Night)
> > 
> >   This one is also sung all over the world but the original is in 
> French. Early clickers may have heard an "Easter egg" vocal warm-up 
> track on that melody, as the song was not ready by the deadline, but 
> became available in record time after the newsletter went out *grin*
> > 
> > 4. Auld Lang Syne
> > 
> >   This song has the largest number of performers, across two 
> continents, making it the perfect closing number for our little 
> project. But it was a challenge to mix as some of the tracks were very 
> noisy (we only have one, arguably two decent recording locations). 
> Overall I think it worked very well, but you should maybe not turn up 
> the volume too much. This is also a song where you hear something new 
> every time you listen to it.
> > 
> > Well, enough talking, here are the songs!
> > 
> > http://www.lsoft.com/news/issue4-2009-us.asp (click on the New Year 
> card to begin)
> > 
> > I hope you enjoyed them :-)
> > 
> >  Eric