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MY ONE AND ONLY LOVE/Jazz Standard
Inspired by the ultimate rendition by Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Ravenscroft piano (I still don't have a sustain pedal!) micrologue acoustic bass and ISymphonic Strings. Recorded in Cubasis using the waves ultramaximizer.
Comments
Very well played. Didn't notice the lack of a pedal. Bravo!
Always nice to hear a good musician play one of my very favorite standards. I agree that Johnny Hartman owns this one, but the rest of us can rent it now and then.
What do you use for a keyboard controller?
Really good! It’s just missing sustain pedal. Why don’t you have one, btw? I have one so small it fits in my pocket if I needed to. I prefer ones that are piano sized though.
Thanks for reminding me of this old favorite! I love Rikki Lee Jones’ version of it featuring Robben Ford on guitar.
Really sumptuous song and performance.
It really is quite wonderful as is but I can only imagine added sustain. I hope you find the sustain button on the Cubasis On Screen keyboard in the upper left of that pop-up keybaord window. Then hit record on just the piano track and add doses of sustain to get that extra string resonance effect that RC 275 provides. I think you'll like it and find it worth the effort.
I saw a demo of a guitar pedal that acts like a sustain pedal: play a bar chord and the notes hang in mid air while your fingers are free to move up the neck and add some extra notes.
That allows the guitar player to build some three octave harmonic structures. I'd love to play with one. In time there will be an app for this... might be one out there already.
This was ultra cool. They should make keychains with small sustain pedals so we’d never travel without one
And why doesn’t my iPhone have a box opener yet...
So if you recorded a piano performance in midi you can add sustain later in Cubasis? Thanks for the tip.
On any MIDI track you can bring up the on screen keyboard and apply sustain events to that track using the "sustain button". It creates a nice wash effect for PAD's for example. Very much like an extreme reverb FX added on demand for short bursts. And it can be added later using automation or overdubbing in a loop mode.
Really great stuff, reminds me how much I haven’t practiced
@scadet had to post the ultimate! Never heard Rikki Lee sing this. Beautiful thanks!
@Dman, @Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr, I am using a Casio At5 at our summer digs. I brought a sustain pedal that fits my Roland FA07 but failed to test it. Of course the polarity is reversed! Sustain kicks in when I lift my foot! Life is so full of ironies ( is that ironic?). Until I got the Ravenscroft app I never played piano so I didn't really need a sustain. Now I see I do. Many thanks for your kind remarks! Glad to see some fans of these reminders of a time when popular music was more complex harmonically. So great to improvise on!
Check your Casio manual and see if there is a reverse polarity switch in one of it’s menus. Yeah, my little portable sustain pedal doesn’t have a switch on it like my other ones do. I’d never buy a full sized sustain pedal without a polarity switch (I hope Roland doesn’t sell that either!). A lot of keyboards have auto detect and if you have it plugged in before turning on, it will align it properly. My Korg Kross 2 has a menu for for the polarity. The Kross is pretty neat I’d say one of the best battery powered portable keyboards available. the 88 weighted key version is even battery powered.
Also, pasting in sustain pedal message into Cubasis might not be the best idea. I guess Cubasis records MIDI at 48PPQ (Pulses per quarter note) So, Cubasis is extremely low resolution and I’d say Piano is definitely one thing that you will undoubtedly notice that on. I was always wondering why recording MIDI piano into Cubasis sounded really choppy, not very fluid, and definitely not how I played it. Then I learned about the PPQ thing and it all made sense. 48 PPQ is chopping each bar into 192 sections I guess. I might need to do more verification on that math... As suggested here you can run it at double tempo for double MIDI resolution. 96PPQ seems to be the “absolute” minimum standard for most things. https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=183&t=59378#p359190
I remember that in the piano poll, someone pointed that the pianos rendered in Auria (960 PPQ) sounded better. Honestly, these days most people are accustomed with hearing low quality (that is, compressed audio, mp3) all day, so these “details” usually go unnoticed for many people nowadays. Seriously. Widespread mp3 listening plus do-it-yourself producers that grew listening to mp3 are lowering general audio standards for music, which is funny, since recording and reproduction tech was never that good, never that accurate.
That is the Shizz right there, brother.
Woooo-weeee!
@McDtracy check out what @theconnactic says about sustain in Cubasis, and thanks, Dimitri for the kind words!
@theconnactic said,
I remember that in the piano poll, someone pointed that the pianos rendered in Auria (960 PPQ) sounded better. Honestly, these days most people are accustomed with hearing low quality (that is, compressed audio, mp3) all day, so these “details” usually go unnoticed for many people nowadays. Seriously. Widespread mp3 listening plus do-it-yourself producers that grew listening to mp3 are lowering general audio standards for music, which is funny, since recording and reproduction tech was never that good, never that accurate.
Quote
Let's say the BPM is 60. 48 PPQ would mean it would have a resolution of 1/48 seconds for starting and stopping the sustain events. That's a 20 millisecond resolution... or 0.2 tenths of a second. An acceptable tradeoff so Cubasis can do a lot of things at once and still show suitable response times for things a human might notice as being sluggish. I'll bet Auria Pro misses the 960 PPQ or 1/960 or 1 millisec deadline on a regular basis.
One thing I'd love to know is what combination of factors causes Cubasis to just crash when it has too much to do... like play that Grieg Concerto with the Colossus Piano AUv3 plug-in? Auria Pro emits a nasty BUZZ sound when asked to render that combination and hangs. I have to cycle the power on the iPad to stop the noise. I lost all input to the apps and IOS.
There were some wave files in the Piano Poll that dropped notes out of the recording when there was a lot of note events.
Can we divert the conversation to your statement "when popular music was more complex harmonically." When exactly was that? The 50's maybe? Personally, I think Pop Music always tries to move away from the harmonic devices of the previous era. So, the music sounds fresh to the listener. "Bossa Nova", Avante Garde, the "Next Big Thing"... of course a lot of pop innovation is largely rhythmic and changes in the instruments being featured in the mix but harmonically Pop Music does have eras when specific chord progressions would act as a fingerprint for an era.
The "Harmonically complex" era you reference is what we now call in Jazz the "Standards".
The Jazz players culled these tunes from a million others that frankly didn't have a lot goin' on. I loved that fact that Miles Davis heard Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" in 1985 and saw that it fit his musical aesthetic perfectly. Her melody has the same motif and rhythmic devices Miles used in his "Cool Era" solos. His cover of that tune has made it a "Standard".
It's the covers that make othesr want to use it in their songlists.
Well, Melancholy Baby was written in 1915 @McDtracy. Connie Crothers, my teacher, told me that she spent a whole year just playing only that tune! Then she riffed off a Bartok piece. So,yes, the age of the standard 1915 to the mid fifties, I guess, with some outliers. Of course there have been complex tunes after that. For some reason all I can think of is Desafinado! But you mention Cyndi. There are a bunch, I am sure.
Stevie Wonder put out a number of masterpieces in the 1970s that use G.A.S. harmony in innovative ways.
@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr what are GAS harmonies?
I meant Great American Songbook. Too lazy to type it, I guess.
🇺🇸🗽👍🏻🙏
I thought it was the gear addicted syndrome, or something like that.
Yes, Guitar Acquisition Syndrome is the more common interpretation these days. I should have known better.
Melancholy Bay as written was pretty standard fare for it's day in 1915. Lot's of V-I cadences in the usual positions: Vi-ii, II-V, V-I.
I wager that what Connie did with "Melancholy Baby" the 70's could have gotten her burned as a witch in 1915 New Orleans French Quarter. I can only imagine what process she was going through for a year seeking to tap into a world without self-consciousness and playing with the energy that emanates from the earth. I've read that this is how she discovered true improvisation. Pick a melody and repeat it with the melody stated up front and then as a repeated mental "mantra" behind improvised choruses. I've seen her do this on YouTube and hat strikes me is... she really knew the instrument. She found an unusual way to demonstrate her skills with this approach to jazz.
Jazz harmony reached it's culmination with her teacher Lennie Tristano. He pushed jazz harmony over the edge into something else.
@McDtracy Yeah, Connie was a child prodigy. She breathed music. She once awoke on the floor, halfway between her bed and piano. She had headed in the piano direction in the middle of the night but didn't make it. She taught harmony, as Lennie did with sheets of numbers. 135, 1235, 1356, 12356, 17, 137, 1237, 251 2351, 2361, 3561', 3569, etc, etc, a student would play those note positions thru all 12 scales. Then there were minor lists, diminished lists, etc. those handwritten sheets of paper, full of numbers, became well worn by me! She always pointed out that these were examples of harmonies within chords and that they only served to show my fingers the way to my own harmonic delights. Everything was designed to get the original out of a student. Nothing was imitative, as opposed to the way many jazz teachers present it. (Watch this, now you do it). She played very little at a lesson. Mostly we would trade improvised, one handed melodies on standards, but that was to demonstrate playing with feeling and a note to note consciousness, not to play like her. As in tai chi, her energy always lifted my own and my playing at lessons was generally better than on my own for many years,
Of course there was harmonic analysis of songs, but I wasn't drawn to that. I just know the basics consciously, but a lot happens intuitively and thru a physical feeling of my hands moving in different ways,
Connie and Lennie were unique players, charting their own original courses. Amazing I was led to them,
Thanks, @Cracklepot. Your praise means a lot to me.
It's nice to see respect for the variety of musical styles and music makers shown on this forum.
I can fix your pedal w/ a new AUv3 App called "StreamByter" by swapping the Sustain On's and Off's. The App is $7 and this is the code to do the magic:
B0 40 7F = B0 40 01
B0 40 00 = B0 40 7F
B0 40 01 = B0 40 00
If anybody cares I can explain the details of the "magic spell".
I will check that out right now, @McDtracy. Thanks!