Recently, I've been sorting through available recordings that are in the public domain or licensed via creative commons (to serve as background music in an independent game project). Due to that, It has become much clearer to me just how big the gap between freely available music scores and available recordings - commercial or otherwise - is.
An interesting illustration is the case of Steve's Bedroom Band, which has 214 recordings (mostly string quartets) under its belt, a fraction of what is freely available:
None or almost none of these works have been recorded by a professional group, and as it turns out, not by an amateur group either, since Steve's Bedroom Band consists of said Steve playing each instrument and then puzzling the piece together on Audacity:
""It took me a while to learn the tricks, but I always start with a click track, usually at constant tempo although sometimes put together in sections. After roughly recording every part to get a feel for the piece (usually starting with the first violin, the cello mostly recorded an octave higher on the viola and dropped 12 semitones using the pitch change option of Audacity) I go through it altering the tempo at constant pitch wherever it’s dictated by the music. I then mute each track one at a time and re-record everything from the cello up with many many stops and starts to get everything more or less note-correct. Very nasty passages may go down almost one note at a time! Then I go through it again making patches and tweaking the dynamics by a few dB to correct the balance. If the whole thing sounds a bit tired I find I can get away with boosting the tempo by up to about 8% without it sounding too artificial. Finally I mix it to stereo, add some reverb and convert it to mp3. The whole process takes maybe 6-12 hours for a 4-movement quartet – much quicker than creating a MIDI soundprint and possibly also more musical…
"For goodness sake don’t expect immaculate performances – just something that will give interested parties an impression of what the piece sounds like, hopefully without too many wrong notes and “train-crash” noises.""
I'm not suggesting that all these works are hidden gems. But the fact that the majority of the musical output of the last (IMSLP alone has scores for 118000 works) few hundred years remains unrecorded is unsettling.
An interesting illustration is the case of Steve's Bedroom Band, which has 214 recordings (mostly string quartets) under its belt, a fraction of what is freely available:
None or almost none of these works have been recorded by a professional group, and as it turns out, not by an amateur group either, since Steve's Bedroom Band consists of said Steve playing each instrument and then puzzling the piece together on Audacity:
""It took me a while to learn the tricks, but I always start with a click track, usually at constant tempo although sometimes put together in sections. After roughly recording every part to get a feel for the piece (usually starting with the first violin, the cello mostly recorded an octave higher on the viola and dropped 12 semitones using the pitch change option of Audacity) I go through it altering the tempo at constant pitch wherever it’s dictated by the music. I then mute each track one at a time and re-record everything from the cello up with many many stops and starts to get everything more or less note-correct. Very nasty passages may go down almost one note at a time! Then I go through it again making patches and tweaking the dynamics by a few dB to correct the balance. If the whole thing sounds a bit tired I find I can get away with boosting the tempo by up to about 8% without it sounding too artificial. Finally I mix it to stereo, add some reverb and convert it to mp3. The whole process takes maybe 6-12 hours for a 4-movement quartet – much quicker than creating a MIDI soundprint and possibly also more musical…
"For goodness sake don’t expect immaculate performances – just something that will give interested parties an impression of what the piece sounds like, hopefully without too many wrong notes and “train-crash” noises.""
I'm not suggesting that all these works are hidden gems. But the fact that the majority of the musical output of the last (IMSLP alone has scores for 118000 works) few hundred years remains unrecorded is unsettling.