Bravo!
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Moshe Barak
Head, User Support
Taub Computer Center
Technion IIT
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E-mail [log in to unmask]
Phone: 972 4 8293689

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