Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella

Since Guitarhacker posted a list of public domain Christmas songs, I thought I'd take the hint and do a Christmas instrumental.

Somewhere along the line I lost the original MGU file for this, so I'm not sure exactly which tracks I used. I think the string pad came was a SuperMIDI Track, I don't recall which. There's a background fiddle RealTrack buried deep in the mix.

The 2976:Vocal Oohs-Aahs, Background Pop3-part Ev 085 didn't smoothly connect the chords, so they were manually crossfaded in my DAW. They've never seemed to work correctly for me, which is too, because they sound lovely, frown

I originally used Acoustic, Bowed HeldSimple Ev 110 for the bass, but there were some issues with it - some odd rhythms, for example. When I rendered the third verse in D major, there were a bunch of gaps in the audio, so I'm wondering if files are corrupted on my machine. I ended up replacing the track with an arco bass from JABB.

The rest of the tracks are VSTis from various places.

I tried writing a "real" string trio intro for the intro, but was pretty awful.

Toward the end of the Black Friday sales, I picked up a VSTi violin, cello and trumpet from Waverunner (still on sale at this writing), so I figured I should somehow use them. They're really more "ambient" sounds, but rather lovely anyway.

The steel string guitar, nylon string guitar and mandolin are all from Indiginus. They're a lot of fun to play, and I figured if I bought them, I should use them.

The woodwinds in first and second verse are from my trusty GPO library, with the Waverunner trumpet doubling in the background to give it some heft.

Verse three uses the pennywhistle from Embertone, as well as the Jubal flute to take some of the edge off. It's probably mixed so low it's not even necessary. With a mandolin and pennywhistle it was rather shrill, so I got some help from my son to EQ it, and added a 12 string to add some midrange. The strings on that verse are a bit spongy.

Mixing was done using Ozone Elements, Neutron Elements and EZMix and some other plugins.

As always, comments (both positive and negative) are appreciated.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?