Week 1: Setting Sails!

Blaise Laflamme That was great, Blaise! I love the tone colors you gave us in there. I hope we get to hear more of those miniatures from you. Great start to the challenge!

Eric Phillips Thank you Eric! I'll see if I can record a few others from those, but at the moment I'm collaborating on other stuff with him, his «Quebec Suite» where I have 2 titles recorded out of 10 on his YT Channel, I also have a playlist on my own channel for this if you want to check out. But in this challenge I want to share a few other composers from here! 

Jack Stewart Thank you Jack, I'm happy if I made you discover a composer! I'll post from other less-known composers from here over the challenge, and particularly one I discovered last year.

Blaise Laflamme so beautiful. What a pleasure to listen to this recording.

12 miniatures-  food for another challenge?

joosje Thank you Joosje, they are very approchable and not that hard to learn and play. If that would be of interest for a challenge I would have to ask the composer if we can have a kind of arrangement for the score.

Michael Shirk Thank you Michael, for sure a Spruce top combined with Regal strings provide punchiness! 

Blaise Laflamme very nice performance Blaise, as always; it is almost a guanrantee for a joy to watch everytime you play! Crisp and clear and great tone! 

Hope you don't mind a side question. What are your MICs model? I have the entry Sennheiser MK4 pair, they are a bit slow on the transient and a bit two warm and lack a bit of details. I want to achieve a more detailed sound, faster transient response; so I thinking of upgrading my MICs.

Khiem Nguyen Thank you Khiem, I'm happy you like it! For microphones on this take I was using a pair of Neumann KM184, and I like to combine a third one with a large diaphragm when I can, then I use a Neumann TLM102. I also get good results with Martin's recommendation of Line Audio CM4, very good for the price. Pro mics are not cheap and I had not the chance to try a lot of them like Gefell, DPA and Schoeps. I suspect with any of them you get amazing results as long as you know how to use them.

Blaise Laflamme sounds good, and I like the music, never heard of that composer so thank you for letting me know and unnessesary to say that your playing is sooo fine

Blaise Laflamme Thank you very much Blaise for sharing your experience with Microphones. I have just looked at Line CM4 following your advice. They have very attractive price and the datasheet show a very flat frequency response all over a wide range of frequency - very tempting! I think I would like to try it. The Neumann KM184 is way over my budget for the moment. 

Stefanie Mosburger-Dalz Thank you Stefanie, I hope to help you discover a few more over the challenge. Thank you for the kind words 

Khiem Nguyen yeah the CM4 are very attractive and decent, I also bought their omni variant named OM1. Well, the KM184 were the cheapest among a short list I had and by this time last year almost any mics were not available here, then I selected a «safe» choice with a great resell value in case I would not have been satisfied, but I am 

Steve Price Thank you Steve, you can access his YT channel and listen to many of his works.

Tomas Rodriguez Thank you Tomas  I'm not sure I'll post more of this series but I have some more Canadian composers I'd like to share for sure.

Marilyn Blodget Thank you Marilyn, it's a quick and short piece like the other miniatures of the series. Do you intend to participate in the challenge?

Marilyn Blodget Oh, that would be great to hear you play, Marilyn! (No pressure, though )

Moyses Lopes Thank you Moyses, there's a lot to listent to on his YT channel.