10Kmiles
I've been a guitar player since I was 13 and
I don't like to think about how long that's been. 8)
All those years I played acoustic six and twelve-string guitar. My
favorite instrument is my
Martin D-25 six-string which I picked up in 1986. In 2001, I was
feeling flush, so I bought
myself a Roland VG-88 guitar modeler and a new fender strat, thus
bypassing electric guitar and
going straight to electronic! I've had hours and hours of bliss
exploring the VG-88 and adapting
my technique to the Fender's fretboard. Out of all this
experimentation, I produced an MP3 of my
arrangement and elaboration of an Elizabethan love song called "Turtle
Dove".
I learned this song from a record my parents had when I was a child.
When I checked with them after
recording this song, I discovered that my recollection of the melody
had been imperfect. My parents didn't remember the tune perfectly
either, and neither of us could come up with many lyrics.
The following is what I remembered:
Fare thee well my dear, I must be gone
And leave you for a while
If I will away, I'll come back again
If I go ten thousand miles, my dear
If I go ten thousand miles
I also thought the tune was called "Ten Thousand Miles", after the
lyric
I remembered. After posting a request for references on this page, I
got an email
from Adam Morris who pointed me to
this link at Digital Traditions. for the song "Turtle Dove". I
instantly
recognized the first lyric, and also spotted some fragments my parents
had been able to offer.
The midi files at the site contained a tune reminiscent of what I had
come up with,
but also different in significant ways. Folk music in action! 8)
The instrument patch in this MP3 is a tweak
of the standard VG-88
"12+5" patch. I basically
turned it into a six-string patch, and fiddled with the reverb a
little. Since this tune is a duet
for electronic guitar. I renamed it to "10Kmiles" which nods toward
what i had thought was
the original title, but gives it a 21st century flavor.
My mp3 is here.
It's 5922699 bytes for only
148 seconds of music. I had to encode it at 320K to get something that
didn't
sound horrible. I think that was due to the encoder I had
available. I could probably do better now at a lower bandwidth,
but I have long since lost the original Cubase tracks in a head crash.
