Week 4: Resurrected Rhythms: Celebrating Revived Pieces!
Welcome to the Main Thread for the last week of "Unfinished Business" practice challenge!
- Choose an piece that you have started to practice but never fully commited to finish. It could be a an iconic masterpiece, a technical challenge, a sweet little miniature or a piece that you played a long time ago and always wanted to refresh! You're encouraged to experiment with pieces from composers you're not accustomed to or push your boundaries with a technically demanding work.
- Commit to regular practice and share your journey with the community. Aim to practice daily and upload at least two videos per week to showcase your progress. This will not only aid in keeping you dedicated and motivated but also enables you to share your musical journey with our tonebase family.
- Share your favorite piece or recording that you always wanted to learnm but is still "unfinished business". Your submission will serve as inspiration for others and construct a vibrant repertoire of potential pieces for fellow members to explore.
↓ Happy Sharing! ↓
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Here is Waltz #6. I will now work on the remaining Valses in the set for posting until end of the Challenge.
Later, I will devote more time to each one to hopefully bring up to reasonable performance level.
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Barney Beautiful, Barney. You have an amazing collection of very challenging and beautiful pieces in this set. This has a very different feel than the other waltzes in the collection. I would love to hear them all together. Great job, as always.
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Jack Stewart Thanks Jack!
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Barney Another beautiful Vals. While your playing is already sounding very good, I look forward to hearing all Valses when you have them in their final form.
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Barney Really great progress on this one as well, and you have such a great tone - as well as the quality of the recording sounds really amazing. Curious what kind of mic set up you're using.
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Steve Pederson Thanks Steve!! The Mic set is a pair of Line Audio CM4's with a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 interface. DAW is Reaper. This is a relatively inexpensive setup Martin suggested this during his Recording training sessions on Tonebase. It's not the best, but certainly okay for a non-professional like me.
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Dale Needles Thanks Dale! I'll be lucky if I can get my first attempts for all of them posted before the challenge ends... I'm sure I will be working on these for quite a while.
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Barney That's cool. It's interesting that they don't have any resellers for those mics in the USA. You're getting great results, and that's all that matters!
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Steve Pederson Try nohypeaudio.com. I believe I got the mics from that site which shipped to the U.S.
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Barney Hope to catch them on your Youtube channel.
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Sor – Les Adieux Op 21 (July 28)
Okay, so I lied about yesterday being my last post of this piece for this challenge. In practice, I was playing it pretty well, so I thought I’d give it another go. Naturally, the act of recording it brought my level of playing down a bit, but I still think this is a tad better than yesterday. I confess to using a touch of camera trickery in order to put two takes together.
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Eric Phillips Excellent Eric! Les Adieux is a lengthy and more difficult piece to perform well. The only suggestion I have is to play the "accompaniment" softer than the melody line, so it sings more.
Otherwise, I really enjoyed listening to this. Thanks for doing this update, which keeps getting better.
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Barney Thank you, Barney. I was thinking the same thing as I listened back to this on my walk tonight.
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Eric Phillips This is really quite an improvement, Eric. And it was already at a very high level. You seem to have I inhabited it and made it your own. Beautiful and well done.
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Eric Phillips BTW I just came across this YT of this piece which I thought was a very good version. I haven't listened to many other versions so I don't know how it stands in the overall but I though she did a wonderful job in shaping the dynamics.
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Jack Stewart Thank you, Jack. I have listen to Savigni’s version of this many times, and I love it, probably my favorite of those I have found on YT. And it’s on a real LaCote, too!
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Eric Phillips I made the mistake (sort of) of listening to Beethoven's Les Adieu Sonata op.81A after listening to your penultimate recording. I thought 'Well, Sor is certainly not Beethoven.' After listening to your latest recording I realized there is a lot of wonderful music that is not Beethoven. My faith in Sor has been restored. I wonder what impact Beethoven would have had on Sor if he had heard him. They were contemporaries w/in 7-8 years. It is fun to imagine.
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Jack Stewart Personally, I like to refer to Beethoven as “the Sor of the piano”.
Joking aside, I just listened to the first movement of that piano sonata. Wow, how beautiful! That’s enough to make me want to learn the piano right now.
Yes, it would have been interesting if Beethoven and Sor had met. I would guess it is likely that Sor heard at least some of Beethoven’s music, though. Or, who knows, maybe Beethoven listened to a lot of Sor? (Less likely, I’d say.)
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Eric Phillips Not sure I can hear much difference from your previous post, which I thought was very beautiful and well done. Again, a great piece and performance.
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Eric Phillips Masterful. I like your comment about Sor being the Beethoven of the guitar. I had never considered that before, which is odd since I'm such a huge Beethoven fan, but I heard it in this performance now that you've mentioned it.
Last step: put on a tux, go to a nice acoustic venue and make a recording!
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Steve Pederson Thanks Steve. Sor is often called the “Beethoven of the guitar” (in fact, Manuel Barrueco even has an album of Sor’s music with that title), but just for fun, I was reversing them. After all, Fernando Sor is a household name, right? Who is this Ludwig von guy?
As for that last step, I’ll leave that for the pros. I haven’t worn a tux since I got married twenty years ago.
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Eric Phillips
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Bach - Air - Part 2
This is the second half of the Bach Air. I posted the first half last week and will try to post a full recording of the whole piece before the end of the challenge.
I actually made a recording of the second half prior to this, but when I listened back I noticed I was rolling a lot of the chords. I tried not to do that so much in this video. I understand an orchestra - for whom this was originally written - is not going to roll their chords, but I think for the guitar it is appropriate at times, especially in this day and age. Finding that balance is one of the things I'll be working on the final version.
FYI - the obvious mistakes in this one are not actually part of my transcription.
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Steve Pederson Sounds great, Steve! I look forward to hearing it all together. I think you can now put "Transcriptionist" on your resumé.
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Steve Pederson Continued great job, Steve. This sounds like a very successful transcription. Looking forward to hearing it all together.
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Steve Pederson this is one of my favourite classical piece or maybe even the first piece of classical music that I actually liked. I never expected to hear it on a guitar but it is sounding like it belong. Thanks for sharing!
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End of the Year Challenge: Finish Strong!
