Music Up!

The reason I'm really doing this blog is to give me an outlet to work on music and recording. I'm hoping that the added pressure of playing while recording will ultimately make me a stronger player.

(truth be told, I really wanted to buy some electronics for recording and this is my excuse)

I'm currently taking several classes. I'm taking an advanced mandolin class at the Folk School of St. Louis and also taking weekly 1/2 hour lessons from Mike Compton. This first song is a song I'm learning from Dave M. in the FS Adv. Mando class. I'll be posting some songs from my lessons with Mike soon too.

So without further adieu, here's my first effort.

The song is Twinkle. It's a swingin' song in the key of G major. The main difficulties in the melody of this song are up the neck sections and the rhythmic aspects. The rhythmic part is especially important to get as it's an approach that's often used in Bill Monroe style playing.

I used GarageBand on my iMac to record the music. I didn't use my better mandolins (Silver Angel F5, Pomeroy F4, Gibson F4), because I wanted to plug in and I only have a pickup on my Michael Kelly. Speaking of which, that MK is actually pretty decent once it got a professional setup. It was my first mandolin and as such will probably be a keeper.


The setup for this recording was:
MK with LR Baggs Radius pickup -> LR Baggs Para Acoustic DI -> M-Audio Firewire 410 Interface -> iMac with GarageBand -> iMovie HD

That last step is because I can't seem to figure out how to post plain music files to Blogger, but movies work just fine! ??

The upright bass is a very old King bass. I use a set of K&K pickups and preamp. More on that later. From the preamp I again go into the M-audio interface.

So here it is: Twinkle.