Singing Out
Rachelle’s been going through her music library identifying various snippets to be used as potential ringtones, and one of her recent favorites is “Annie’s Song” by John Denver.
Most of the versions of this out there are strangely quiet, and while it would be possible to go through the various exercises to transcode it into something I could manipulate and boost the volume, I decided to go a different route and just make a new recording.
By simplifying the song to a single instrument from its component layers it should be much more clearly audible, effectually increasing the volume beyond the literal increase it also received. We’ll be testing it out on her phone (since resonant frequencies with the speaker will also matter), but for now I offer it up for public review:
The recording was made on my iPad sitting on a chair next to me, using the built in microphone. It definitely flattened the sound a bit, but the quality is surprisingly clean given the ad hoc setup. If you listen closely you can hear kids playing in the background, but they weren’t disruptive enough to necessitate re-recording. Nor did my stool squeak this time, or the bow scratch (I haven’t raised the A string at the nut yet, so this still happens sometimes), or the pitch get too far from target. All of those other things led to this being the dozenth take or something along those lines, and while it’s still not perfect (next time I’m using headphones to give myself a click track) it should serve its purpose as a ringtone just fine.
Oh, and it was transposed to G Maj just to make it easier to get the tonic on a fingered position so I could put in better vibrato.
Cheers!
