A native Washingtonian, Shirleta Settles is known as not just a voice but an entertainer. She has traveled nationally and internationally with her band sharing her gift of music from festivals and political arenas, including the Howard Theater, the Tinner Hill Blues Festival, the Westminster Church Monday Blues series, and The Bethesda Blues and Jazz Supper Club. Shirleta has been featured on Fox5 News as an outstanding vocalist and entertainer.
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The annual recital series of classical music is a juried competition open to all classical musicians in the United States. Recitals take place in the Main Gallery at Montpelier Arts Center. Classical recitals are free, but a $5 donation per person is appreciated.
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Besides the accompaniment tapes I recorded myself, I also purchasedseveral recordings from Music Minus One. MMO has been in business since 1951, and theyoffer an extensive collection - minus one instrument - of concertos, sonatas, quartets,and trios. They also sell recordings of popular songs and show tunes for vocalists thatyou can play along with on any instrument. Several other companies have recently emergedthat sell pre-recorded and MIDI file accompaniments and other practice aids, and you caneven download MIDI files for free on the Internet. In this article I will describe what isavailable and assess the relative quality of these products. I will also explain thepractical differences between using MIDI files and conventional audio recordings foraccompaniment.
There is one final issue regarding MIDI file creation that should beexplained, to help you understand the accompaniment products that use this method. A MIDIsequencer operates much like a conventional tape recorder; you press a Record button andbegin playing a piano-like keyboard. But as I mentioned earlier, you can optionally enterthe notes one at a time either on the synthesizer’s piano keyboard or thecomputer’s typewriter keyboard. This is called step-entering. There areseveral problems with step-entering the notes, most notably that any Ritards andAccelerandos must be programmed manually by entering metronome numbers at the appropriateplaces in the score. Also, step-entered MIDI files are often devoid of expression becausethe volume level and duration of each note are unnaturally uniform. Therefore, the endresult is not as musical as a piece played by a pianist in real time. However, astep-entered accompaniment, if not elegant, is still adequate for its intended purpose.
I have all of MMO’s available cello accompaniments, and theyare uniformly excellent. With MMO recordings, you get two renditions of each piece: Firstis a complete performance with a professional musician playing the solo part; this isfollowed by an accompaniment-only version of the orchestra or pianist. Where appropriate,audible "taps" were recorded to cue the solo entrances; these taps are notatedin the included printed sheet music. An A-440 tuning note helps you tune your instrument.Most of the offerings from Music Minus One are now available on CD, and these are muchbetter than the older cassette versions - some of which suffered from excessive tape hiss.Each MMO CD costs $22.98 plus shipping.
The Piano Accompaniment series is a collection of threecassette tapes for violinists studying the advanced repertoire. Each tape contains apiano-only accompaniment for three or four complete works. An A tuning note begins eachmovement, and metronome ticks fill the gaps where the solo part plays alone. A nice addedtouch is that the "ticking" is performed by a person who adjusts the volume ofthe ticks appropriately for that point in the music. I listened to Volume 1 which featuresMendelssohn’s Concerto in E Minor, Concerto #4 in D Major by Mozart, and the firstmovement only of Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole. The piano playing is superb, and my only(minor) criticism is that Dolby noise reduction was not used to minimize tape hiss. Eachof the three volumes costs $9.95, and printed music is not included.
These MIDI files - and the cassette tape which was made from a MIDIfile - were step-entered. However, it is apparent that a great deal of time and attentionwent into producing these accompaniments. The note volume levels were handled well, aswere the Ritards. If I have to offer any criticism, it is only that there wasn’tquite enough dynamic variation within the loud and soft passages. That is, the partsmarked Forte in the piano music were consistently Forte rather than varying slightly, aswould be the case if a live pianist had been recorded performing the piece. But the endresult is still musical and a lot of fun to play along with. All of the catalog titlessell for $19.95 for the MIDI file version, and $12.95 for the cassette version. Printedsheet music is not included.
The final three products are intended mainly for the popular andjazz idioms, rather than for classical performances. Two are software programs: You enterthe chords into a table of measures and bars, pick from a list of pre-defined musicalstyles (or create your own), and the programs then generate a complete performance ofbass, drums, piano, and so forth that you can play along with. Although these programs areintended mainly for jazz and popular music, they can also be used for learning toimprovise in classical music styles. You can even enter the chords for a popular tune suchas "Over the Rainbow," and play along with that. Because you can enter anyseries of chords and pick from a large number of styles, these programs are also ideal forsongwriters and arrangers. And being computer programs rather than pre-recorded audiotracks, you can transpose the key or change the tempo very easily.
Mel Bay has been publishing methodbooks for as long as anyone in the business, and they now offer a series of book/CDplay-along products they call Backup Trax. I listened to three offerings from this series:"Traditional Jazz and Dixieland," "Old Time and Fiddle Tunes Volume1," and "Swing and Jazz Volume 1." All come with printed music intended forthe violin and mandolin, though you can use them with any non-transposing treble clefinstrument. Each CD in the series contains high-quality recordings of real playersperforming a number of popular songs in the featured style. The pieces are played slowlyat first with a pre-recorded soloist, then again at normal speed with the soloist stoppingafter the first verse and chorus. Each volume costs $17.95.
Band-in-a-Box was the first popularprogram to offer automatic accompaniment, and versions are available for IBM, Macintosh,and Atari computers. The newest release of Band-in-a-box, version 7.0, is for Windowsonly, and it offers 24 built-in musical styles with names such as Jazz Swing, Waltz,Ballad, and Country 12/8. You can also create your own styles, and the program can evencompose melodies. The chord entry screen is organized much like a computerizedspreadsheet, except that you enter chord names such as D, Am, F7b9, etc. into each squareinstead of numbers and formulas. The music backings created by Band-in-a-box aresurprisingly realistic, though the quality of the instrument timbres of course depends onyour synthesizer or computer sound card. Demo versions and a feature list for most of PGMusic's products are available for free downloading from their web page. The basicBand-in-a-box program costs $88, though product bundles are available that includeadditional style disks.
PG Music, Inc.29 Cadillac AvenueVictoria, BC, Canada V8Z 1T3voice: (toll-free) 888-746-8742; (outside the US and Canada) 250-475-2874fax: (toll-free) 877-475-1444; (outside the US and Canada) 250-475-2937email: support@pgmusic.comweb site: www.pgmusic.com
Although Jammer Professional issimilar in concept to Band-in-a-box, it is capable of creating more complex and moreinteresting music backings. Where Band-in-a-box draws upon pre-defined musical patterns,Jammer Pro actually composes the various instrumental parts. In exchange for what I feelis a better overall result, Jammer Pro is ever so slightly more complex to set up and use.In particular, the music created by Jammer Pro is very "hip," with swinging basslines and outstanding drum beats and fills, and it comes closer than Band-in-a-box toplaying the kind of music I like. More than 200 pre-defined musical styles are included,and you can create your own styles if you are so inclined. Jammer Professional costs $129and is available for IBM-compatible computers running Windows. Complete productinformation and a demo version are available for free downloading on SoundTrek's web page.
Besides the commercial products I’ve described here, you canalso download classical music MIDI files from the Internet. These files are provided freeby people who create them for fun and as a public service, and finding them is often byluck and happenstance. I found some through the Internet Cello Society (www.cello.org), which has links to otherInternet sites of interest to cellists. I found others by searching for "MIDI"and "cello" or "violin" on InfoSeek (www.infoseek.com), a popular and free Internet search service. Some ofthese files are intended as accompaniments, but most are complete performances meant to belistened to, as an alternative to buying a recording. For the latter you would load theminto your sequencer and turn off the solo instrument track. These are just a smallsampling of the files available on the Internet; more are added daily. 2ff7e9595c
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