I have the great pleasure of announcing the imminent release of my CD Guitarias, on February 16th, 2014.
According to my press release -
I’m planning a CD launch party in Toronto for Feb. 16th - I’ll post details about that as soon as the venue is confirmed. I have further details and links on my newly-launched website, www.DougMacNaughton.com , where I’m also selling advance copies through PayPal. I have a physical distribution deal with the Canadian Music Centre, but the disc isn’t available through their website yet; iTunes distribution will probably be up and running in a couple of months.
There are sound clips available on the Recordings page, and there is a full length clip of one of the sixteen tracks available for listening at this link, Gather ye rosebuds, at least for the next week.
The online PDF of the CD booklet can be seen here.
It has been a fascinating journey, taking these pieces from dots on a page to a finished recording. I’m quite thrilled!
I’d like to thank The Mods for their permission to post this, and I’d like to thank the SDMB for its ongoing support over the years.
Guitar music isn’t really my thing but I listened to your Messiah extracts with interest. Did you do a recording with an orchestra? Because I’m sure I’ve heard you before.
Very cool, Le Ministre - thanks for sharing. I am swamped right now, in a good way, so not getting to the Dope as much as I’d like. But I will keep an eye out for this thread and details.
No, I have no recordings out with orchestra - the closest is the ‘Serinette’, but that’s still just a 15 piece chamber ensemble.
I think, though, that I’ve been broadcast on CBC a few times since I signed up here; I think I may have posted a thread with the link to the broadcast before.
I’m glad Messiah grabbed your interest - I’d love to do more of them!
I had actually thought about bumping the GOGT the other day to ask about this, as I thought you would be about ready to release it soon.
I’m surprised by just about everything, here. Since you’re a classical guitarist, I had always pictured you as looking something like Parkening in my head. It’s not bad that you don’t. In fact, it’s probably good. Classical guitar has an image that’s too tall, dark and tidy - IMHO.
Somehow, I had either missed or glossed over your being primarily an excellent singer, and that this was your guitar debut. It’s still excellent guitar playing, and I’m taken aback by how good your voice is. I’m also surprised that it’s in English, since your user name is French (I assume, I don’t speak French), and classical that most people (like me) are familiar with tends to be in any language but English.
Congrats on all of it, I hope to hear it broadcast on the local classical stations soon!
ETA: And the hall sounds great! Was it all natural, or did you tweak it in the mix?
Funny - most of the classical guitarists I know, esp. here in Toronto, are a rather unruly, scruffy bunch. For the photo shoot, I was just having fun with being able to play/sing in various locations. I have a longer term project that involves hiking/canoeing to remote locations to record…
No, my French user name is a red herring - I speak it, but it is very much a second language for me. It comes from the song 2033 by the Québécois band “La Bottine Souriante” (“The beat-up boot”) and means “The Minister from the Beyond”. When I signed up here, that sounded like a good user name for an anonymous voice from the internet. I don’t think I’m very anonymous any more, after this thread…
There’s a fair amount of opera, oratorio, and art song written in English, actually - Purcell, Handel and Britten; Haydn and Mendelssohn all wrote for British audiences in English. For art song for guitar and voice, there’s a ton of Elizabethan/Jacobean rep by Dowland, Campion and their contemporaries, most of which is in English. Sir Peter Pears and Julian Bream did some concerts of that rep. in the late 50s/early 60s, which led to Britten, Berkeley, Tippet, Walton, and their contemporaries writing for the duo (future project…)
As for the miking/mix - we mixed live, direct to stereo. I’m not the best person to ask about the details - although I joke that “It looks just like a Telefunken U47!”, I tend to leave the electronics to someone who knows what they’re doing. So, we had two mikes aimed at the upper and lower parts of the soundboard that were really close - like, climb in here carefully and don’t move around too much kind of close. Then, there were a pair of mikes about 4 feet away that were aimed just over the music stand, to catch the direct voice, and a single stereo mike about 20 feet back and 15 feet up to catch the church’s natural reverb.
The biggest challenge sound wise was - I had booked 4 sessions of 3 hours each for the last 4 Fridays in May, 2013. Each day had a very specific schedule of pieces, and the big, number one rule was - finish everything about a given piece on the same day. Editing between days was to be avoided at all costs!! (The ambient room sound, the tuning, the mike placement and therefore the reverb can all be just slightly different, making an edit too obvious to be tolerated.)
So the Beckwith and Uyeda were recorded on the first day, the Beauvais on the second, and the Rutter was divided between the last two days. That way, we could cut and paste between the best takes of every given pieces while maintaining a continuity of ambient sound. St. George the Martyr/The Music Gallery is a fantastic acoustic, but it’s also a block away from Queen Street, right downtown in Toronto - we lost some good performances to trucks, streetcars, car horns, etc.
And I cannot thank my friend Sung Chung enough for his help as floor producer - because of him listening and following the score, I could just concentrate on playing and singing. We did a minimum of three complete takes of everything, followed by a punch list of bars/phrases that needed re-doing. Sung was who followed along with the score and kept track of all that, so I didn’t have that to worry about it. Couldn’t have done it without him.
A couple of the tracks were actually studio live - Sonnet, the third song in Shadows, for instance. The track on the album is the unedited second take.
When I was typing that, I figured you were probably more representative of the breed than my mental image was. You guys are a bunch of guitarists, after all. You don’t get to Carnegie Hall without practice, practice, practice; and practicing guitar doesn’t make you pretty.
And that’s one hell of a project! I thought recording in the church was special, to record where most people don’t go is crossing into concept album territory. Is there a meaning to the places other than “because it’s there” and current tech allows you to do it?
You should take a drummer along just to have the joy of torturing one, they all seem to hate travel. Really, you shouldn’t, but the image of a drummer riding along in a canoe with his drums just makes me happy inside.
No sir, you are not.
Thank you for the quick primer, I had heard of Britten from the “what will survive to 2114” thread.
My knowledge of classical is paper thin, I’ll check some of it out.
Thanks for the info, I thought it sounded like the vocal mics were a distance away. I imagined that’s partly because in a classical setting, you’re un-amplified, so your voice wouldn’t need a close mic. I wouldn’t have guessed the vocal mic was in stereo, but it does explain some of the richness. That building does have very nice natural reverb, and the engineer caught the whole thing well.
I remember your post about the editing process, it seemed like heavy work, and I hadn’t even thought about the intricacies of producing such a natural recording that you could have edited that way. Getting a couple of flawless takes must have felt great.
It’s a bit of a secret, at least for now. “Concept album” covers some of it - Canadians have always had a very special relationship to the wilderness. That’s all I can tell you for now; I don’t even have the idea fully fleshed out in my own head.
No, I’m happy to say there are no recordings of my piano playing - I do have a lovely grand piano in the new house, but my playing is still rudimentary. I have a friend who is a vocal coach who rents my 2nd floor studio for five hours a day; it helps with the bills.
You raise a good point, though - Liz Upchurch and William Aide are credited on my music.CBC.ca page, but I need to get their names somewhere on my website! (Adding that to the ‘fix list’.)
Sitting here, surfing the Dope, and listening to a most excellent Doper singing! My copy of the CD arrived today. I waited until Mrs Piper took the Cub up to go to bed, so I could savour it. Lovely singing, playing, and poetry for a quiet late night.
Thanks so much, Le Ministre de l’au-delà, for the music and for the lovely note which accompanied it.
Hi, everyone. I’ve obtained the permission of The Mods to do a CD Giveaway Contest. Here’s how it will work -
I will give away one (1) copy of my CD Guitarias to the first person who can guess the name of the dog on the front cover of the CD sleeve and booklet (PDF of the booklet can be seen here at this link.)
Please, only one guess per post.
Enter as often as you wish, at least until the one copy of the CD is given away.
The winner will then send me a PM with their preferred mailing address - it doesn’t have to be your home address, work would be fine, whatever. Anywhere where you can get the disc. (Not everyone wants an internet weirdo like me knowing his or her address - I get it.)
‘First’ will be determined by the order of the unedited posts! (No editing, in other words!)
Many thanks for your kind words; I appreciate that very much.
And I’m sorry I couldn’t get the contest together in time for you to possibly win. I’m hoping you’ll give it a go anyway - maybe you could win a copy and give it to a friend. (Or an arch-nemesis… )
: Many thanks; I appreciate that!