Robert Burns Night - a bit late

[Uncle Al]

To all who celebrate Robert Burns Night I give you
THIS MUSICAL REPAST of Highland Cathedral

Uncle Al

[r.m.anderson]

As always "SPLENDID - MARVELOUS - BRAVO" !!!!!

Thanks Uncle Al !

[crfriend]

To all who celebrate Robert Burns Night I give you
THIS MUSICAL REPAST of Highland Cathedral

So that explains the comment I received the other day in the local supermarket whist I was wearing my plaid near-mini, "Ah, it's Burns Day!".

The piece is a rousing one, make no bones, but the synthesizer in use is a pale shadow of a proper gang of pipers. The keyboardist gives it her all, but the instrument just doesn't deliver the punch. Maybe it's youTube, but the "pipes" just don't snarl the way they need to.

[DonaldG]

Yes Carl, Highland Cathedral is best played on the bagpipes - our local pipe band plays it rousingly at each Farmers Market.

Celebrated Burns day, kilted of course, with haggis, neeps and tatties, shared with some friends.

[crfriend]

With absolutely no disrespect towards Uncle Al, nor to the keyboardist he linked to, here's what the piece really should sound like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lnk4na_eNs

There is something about the raspy, snarling sound of the bagpipe chanter that can send shivers through one -- and the Scots know it. The ultra-taught snare drums also help in this regard.

Now, pair that with an all out pipe organ in concert mode with a 64' register and a good arrangement.... (drool)

[Uncle Al]

GEEZE
40 pipers, drummers and a couple of French Horns may sound "Proper"
but that is to the 'ear' of the beholder. The WERSI Louvre is an excellent
instrument which conveyed the essence of the music quite well. (Wish I
could afford a Louvre but not at $135,000.00 USD.)
The artist, Claudia Hirschfeld - a German organist - did an excellent job.
This is a fine example of how a "Theatre Organ" (wind-powered pipes or
digital) can replace an orchestra.
This is not saying the mode of recording was appropriate or adequate
for this performance. But to go from a full pipe band to ONE person
giving an almost identical performance is nothing to sneeze at.

Uncle Al


OK Carl , you snuck in a reply before I finished typing.

[Darryl]

I thought both clips were outstanding!

Then again I've got 3 Yamaha keyboards stacked in the living room (no footpedals, though) and have just started learning the pipes.

Hmmm...maybe I'll try tweaking the 'bagpipe' samples and see if I can improve it any.

[crfriend]

This is not saying the mode of recording was appropriate or adequate for this performance. But to go from a full pipe band to ONE person giving an almost identical performance is nothing to sneeze at.

I just gave it (yet) another listen (and, yes, it's good, but somehow lacking -- and it may be in the acoustics the thing was recorded in).

I recall the somewhat "savage" days of synthesizers -- back when it was all about waveform, modulation, and filters. I also remember trying very hard to get an old-school ARP Odyssey analogue synthesizer to sound like a proper bagpipe chanter. (Forget about the drones here; the Odyssey was a monophonic instrument that could produce one tone at a time -- you couldn't even do chords unless you tied two oscillators together and even then you were stuck with fixed-differential-pitch.) But I came pretty close, and if I recall I used a tight pulse-modulation (part of a square-wave with about a 30% duty cycle) to get the fundamental and then fiddled with it for all the other parameters. It took days to get it to sound good, and several pages of notebook-paper so I'd know where to start from when somebody else played with the thing.

In the digital realm there is no excuse. You sample the original, build the mathematical model of how it reacts over its natural pitch-space, and be done with. If one selects "bagpipe" on the console, one should also get the drones (which in Scots pipes are not optional as they are in Irish pipes (which I also adore)) at proper pitch and volume. There should also be "pitch-bend" knob (or pedal) on the synthesizer to play with the sound according to how hard the piper's arm is squeezing the bladder.

Music is wonderful to listen to, and easy to appreciate. Making it, however, can be a heck of a lot of work (and fun). Engineers should apply; the concepts are universal.