To those who kindly took the time to listen to and comment on my recording:
Rob, thank you for your continuous encouragement. It really means a lot coming from someone with your level of expertise. Stuart, to be honest I don't believe I'm at the point yet where I can worry too much about getting phrases to stand out without losing the pulse. I'm pretty happy if I can just get my fingers to the right place at the right time. I guess I would have to say that I can't really play the lute musically yet, only mechanically. Not that I'm doing particularly well on that front either. I agree with your point about razor-sharpness. It is usually notated as a trilled note followed by two sixteenth notes, though I have heard it on recordings as two thirty-second notes. I don't have the rhythmic values very precise yet. I am looking forward to hearing one of your pieces. When can we look forward to one? Martin, I have a facsimile on CD, and the piece is on the Adobe Acrobat page 66. According to the table of contents at the end, however, it is on the Barbe Manuscript page 74. I tried playing through Weiss originally but found a lot of it too difficult. I especially had trouble making much musical sense of some of the preludes. (I don't know how Daniel Shoskes does it. He seems to play it so precisely.) So, I decided to see whether the French repertoire was any easier, and I picked the Barbe Manuscript because of the fingering indications. I got a very metallic sound on my 10-course Renaissance lute and haven't played it anymore since getting my Baroque lute (I am waiting for the builder of the latter to make me another 10-course with the same string spacing to facilitate the transition between the two instruments). For the longest time I thought the problem was simply my poor technique, but I think a new instrument and gut strings have helped a lot, and I am more satisfied with the sound I am getting now. Background hiss and a metallic sound are precisely the two things that I am trying most to avoid. I have the mic about two feet away and a little to the right. I increase the gain and run a function under the channel blender, which drammatically improves the sound quality. I would like to add some reverb then, but nothing seems to sound very good after the channel blender. Anthony, I usually have to do quite a few takes before I can get one that doesn't have any gross mistakes in it. One thing that helps me is to think that if I make a mistake on this take, I can just erase it and do another. That seems to take some of the pressure off. I have only played in public a few times--a meditation piece after communion in church, for example, and I found it an absolutely nerve-wracking experience. I'm not cut out for public performance. I played Renaissance lute for about four years before taking up the Baroque lute. I have to say that though there are virtuosic Renaissance pieces that I shall never be able to play, there are thousands that are well within my reach. I haven't found that to be the case with Baroque music. There doesn't seem to be a lot of easy music for it. Most of it seems pretty advanced to me. For the drums there are scores of books containing technical, rudimental exercises aimed at building skill. Playing through them really works. I don't know of any books like that for the lute, but I certainly think it would help if I had a series of technical exercise to play through for an hour a day. Again, my sincere thanks to those who responded. I greatly appreciate your kind words. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
