This may have gone under the radar a bit since it was in my MTP, but my earliest assignment was to transcribe verse/chorus from a song called When You Believe from the motion picture Prince Of Egypt, in particular the version by Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston..
Anyhow, a request to try to improve the arrangement lead to the following, which I kind of started as a joke but I carried on. There are lots of examples of different types of rearrangement so it serves on a functional basis too
This isn't mixed and I don't have the time to spend improving it anymore so the levels aren't great, but hopefully it's not too bad.
So here it is for your listening pleasure: When You Be Mashin'
When_You_Be_Mashin_.mp3 ( 5.61MB )
Number of downloads: 762EDIT: I've had a request to give some more detail on how this was recorded and such like. The instrumentation used to record was either my Clavinova or my guitar. These in conjunction with some VSTs, which are pretty outdated now. They include EWQL products (not the Play editions) and Amplitube or Waves Mercury GTR for the guitar/bass. My guitar goes through a GT8 but I only use it for the expression pedal, I very rarely use any of the soundbanks any more. The Clavinova acts as my midi input device for both recording and scoring by key input. When recording expressive instruments like a violin or such, I have a little trick where I use the GT8 expression pedal as a midi controller assigned to the mod wheel, to which I set various controls - usually to control the amount of vibrato or attack, but it varies depending on the musical context. That's about it really. Oh, occassionally, as you'll have one or two times in the above track, I'll use a Reason Drum Refill but I tend to use these for the individual drum sounds. The rhythms and patterns I key in using a midi editor. Sometime I'll steal of sample pattern and tweak it to suit, but most of the time I just key in the notes and velocities/expression envelopes. Bass I will sometimes use a VST instrument, othertimes I'll just play the bass for real, it depends - the funk and rock/metal sections at the end wouldn't work with VST instruments, especially the funk bit - those pops and slaps are easier to just play and record live and they sound better - it just takes a little while (for me) to get the right amount of compression on since my bass is very very twangy and I'm a twangy bass player.
Mixing.. well, that's another matter. I have had some experience in mixing and mastering but, as no doubt you'll be able to tell, I didn't bother here - mainly because there were so many different tracks that I had to keep bouncing and I don't have the time right now on something that was just meant to be a musical "joke". I have more serious songs to write at the moment
At some point, perhaps next week, I may attach the score for the big band section which seems to have garnered the most interest. The harmonisation and instrumentation may appeal to some of you. However, I did write about all that in my articles.. check those out if you're interested
Any questions, please feel free to ask. I'm more than happy to try answering them...