Minimalist video shot in Death Valley +
St Louis Waltz =
———————
Death Valley Waltz

This uses the chords from “Italian Hymn” by Felice de Giardini, so I’m calling it “sort of Italian Song”. I learned it from Mutopia.

sort of Italian Song (MP3)

To the extent possible under law, Lucas Gonze has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to sort of Italian Song. This work is published from United States.

This is an 1877 tune written by Mr. C. Nolf. I learned it from sheet music at http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm.a2315/.

Dodworth was a dance instructor who wrote a book on how to dance. In the book he made up a way to do the waltz in 5/4. C. Nolf wrote this song, which is a waltz in 5/4, so there would be music for people to use with Dodworth’s whacky dance.

I want people to reuse my music in videos, so copyright on this recording is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 unported. Or pretty much any other license if you can be bothered to email me at lucas@gonze.com to ask.

I left a few little booboos in. They weren’t too bad. With a little editing this could be cleaned up to Playboy standards, so if you need edits to use the music feel free to ask.

Here’s straight up audio files, unencumbered by video:

• Dodworth’s Five Step Waltz (Ogg FLAC)
• Dodworth’s Five Step Waltz (MP3)
• Dodworth’s Five Step Waltz (Ogg Vorbis)
• Dodworth’s Five Step Waltz (AIFF)

This song scared the hell out of me when I first found it. The printout sat around for a long time before I got the courage up to try it. But as it turned out the writing has a comfortable and natural flow that carries you right along.

To put it in historical context, ragtime was getting long in the tooth but wasn’t over the hill yet. Pop was morphing into a rowdier, hotter, and blacker form. Lynchings were at their height. Blackface minstrelsy was still common but was a style for older people. Blacks were abandoning the banjo en masse; the saxophone was hip; brass military bands were becoming New Orleans -style second lines. The reigning white banjo virtuoso Vess Ossman was declining and Fred Van Eps was taking his place.

MP3

As part of my blog series on mother songs, this post is my recording of the 1893 tear jerker “A Widow’s Plea For Her Son.”

The guitar was a 2007 National Estralita Deluxe. The microphone was a Sure SM 81 pre-amplified with an ART Tube MP3. I recorded on a Macbook using iMovie HD, the 2006 version, and the built-in video camera.

An important tip for this kind of setup is that the audio will have a high-pitched whine unless you use an external mic.

I did about fifteen takes, counting false starts. This is a quarter or less of my normal count.

The setting was next to the window in my workroom right around noon, when the sunlight floods in and creates strong contrasts.

The microphone is positioned just above the camera frame. This is to emphasize the singing.

I did the audio processing in Garageband. First I doubled the original mono source by importing the movie twice into the same Garageband file. In one of those tracks I applied the “guitars/big wheels” filter to give the guitar presence. In the other track I applied the “vocals/male basic” filter to enhance the resonance of my voice. I mixed them back together with no panning to minimize a seasick side-effect caused by the “big wheels” filter otherwise.

The copyright on the composition is in the public domain, so my version is absolutely legal.

My recording here is permissively licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license version 3.0 unported, which means more or less that you can copy and reuse as long as you use the same license and link back to here. If you need another license, like a non-commercial license, just email lucas at gonze dot com to get permission.

MP3 version: Lucas Gonze — Frog in the Well (MP3) (1:12)

FLAC version: Lucas Gonze — Frog in the Well (FLAC) (1:12)

As always, this recording is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, and you are welcome to ask for a version under a different license (like a fully commercial license or a CC non-commercial license.

Update: for tablature and sheet music, see the followup post to this one.

This is a recording of an 1876 tune called “Centennial Grand March”. It’s a bit tricky, and when I first tried it on stage about a year ago it scared the hell out of me. Now that I’ve got it down it’s a lot of fun to play. I love the chromatic melodies, the way the parts tell a story, and the mood.

This is my third recording of work by W. L. Hayden, the composer. I did a couple pieces from Hayden’s Star Collection of Guitar Music, from which I learned Celebrated Shoo Fly Galop and Must I, Then.

MP3: Lucas Gonze – Centennial Grand March

FLAC: Lucas Gonze – Centennial Grand March

Sheet music: at the Library of Congress web site.

Feel free to share and remix per the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 unported license.

Technical notes

I got rid of the high pitched background whine in my first video by using an external iSight video camera rather than the one built into my laptop. To use an external camera you have to use iMovie 06 rather than the more recent 08 version, so I switched to 06, and it turned to be a lot better and easier to use.

Also, I got a more full and punchy sound by switching from the built-in mic to an external one, a Sure SM81.

This post is my second recording of D. E. Jannon’s 1854 piece Carrie Waltz. I previously blogged it about a year ago on blog.gonze.com.

MP3: Carrie Waltz, version 2 (2:27)

I redid it because I’ve gotten better since then. Now I know to make a song start strong in the first couple seconds, to make the lines more fluid and improvisational, and to mash the guitar right onto the mic for a hotter recording.

Sheet music here:

Versions of the recording in other file formats:

• Carrie Waltz, version 2 (FLAC)
• Carrie Waltz, version 2 (Ogg Vorbis)

You are free to share and remix this recording per the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US license.

After posting my Vess Ossman playlist I came across a star recording over on archive.org that I didn’t know about — a 1907 banjo version of Scott Joplin‘s 1899 piece Maple Leaf Rag, which would be almost the only currently recognizeable song in Ossman’s recorded works. (The other recognizeable works are the highly lame “William Tell Overture” and “Yankee Doodle”):

Vess Ossman – Maple Leaf Rag (1907)

According to Tangleweed, the blog where I found the song:

Only two of Joplin’s rags were recorded commercially during his lifetime, and the first piano recording of his most famous composition, Maple Leaf Rag, was not made until 1923, six years after his death.

More typical is this arrangement by banjo virtuoso Vess Ossman. The ubiquity of the banjo and relative scarcity of the piano in early recorded music has more to do with the limitations of early mechanical recording technology than with the popularity of the instruments. The volume and focused, directional sound of the banjo, combined with its lack of sustain, made it ideal for early mechanical recordings. Instruments like the piano and violin, however, tended to sound weak and warbly.

Dancing

Playing along

I learned this song from sheet music at the Library of Congress. It’s not a beginner piece, but it’s pretty approachable.

The embedded images here are linked to full-size PDFs, so click through if you want a printout to learn from.

Here’s the cover sheet, which was printed in cheapo black and white:

Here’s the part, which is a short one-pager:

Free culture

There is an Ogg Vorbis version of the audio file and an Ogg FLAC version.

There is code to embed a player for the song in another web page:

This page uses the hAudio microformat.

This recording is copyright 2008 by Lucas Gonze and released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States license. You are free to share or remix it as long as you give attribution and apply the same terms to works based on this one. If you need another license for some reason just contact me and we’ll arrange it.

You are welcome to link directly to any file I host, including MP3s. No need to host a copy to spare my bandwidth.

If you do a version of this and want a link here, let me know.