This melody is my Melody of 2011. I love it!

This is a song from the Russian musical Nord-Ost written by my favorite composers and songwriters Alexey Ivaschenko and Georgy Vasiliev. It was a very successful musical until it was attacked by terrorists in 2002. You can find more information about Nord-Ost here.

I’ve got the idea of playing this tune in the middle of the last year and spent a lot of efforts for arranging it. It was my “stretch goal” to play. I’ve never played such tunes before. It was both beautiful and challenging to play. There are three key changes in this song (Gm -> G -> A). Its intro and ending reminds me melodies from the old russian fairy tales movies played on folk instruments. One of its parts at the end requires the greater finger independence similar to “boom-chick” style and it took me a while to acquire that skill.

I am very satisfied with that song. Of course, I’ve got a lot of things to improve – clearer arrangement, “thicker” sound and more accurate tone production, better dynamics and better recording/mixing skills. But I love this song (did I say that already?). Enjoy!

Playing

It’s still difficult for me to play a F chord in C-Shape with partial barre on the 5-th fret. My grip is not precise nor firm enough for that chord – I’ve rarely used it before. Probably, it will take another month or two of practice until I will be able to play it clearly and with confidence. It was interesting to note that I didn’t have any issues with that chord on a nylon-string classical Takamine TC132SC guitar with the wider neck and softer strings than ones on Takamine TF740FS. Strange, isn’t it?

Recording

This time I continued my experiments with video recording. Here is my setup:

Video:

• Zoom Q3HD video recorder, 1920×1080
• Nikon Coolpix LS110, 1280×720

Audio:

• Zoom Q3HD, 96Kbps, 24 bits

I also experimented with recording sound from guitar pickup & preamp into portable recorder Zoom H1, but wasn’t able to get a decent sound and didn’t use it in the mix.

I processed audio in Cakewalk Sonar. Here is what I did:

• EQ:
  • lowered mid frequencies a bit
  • cut the frequencies below 60Hz and above 15Khz
• Compression: applied 2:1 ratio (it’s barely noticeable)
• Reverb: I took “Short and Sweet” preset in Sonar’s Sonitus Reverb and made it even shorter
• Final touch: applied Cakewalk’s ”Increased Width” effect in the Channel Tools

Even though Zoom Q3HD was capable to record with higher video resolution, Nikon gave me better picture due to better lenses. I know that the picture is still not so good, primarily due to the bad lighting, but I’ll address it in the later sessions. It’s still my hobby recording at home, so I’ll improve it step by step.

Finally, I merged audio and video in my video editor and added titles in the beginning and at the end of the clip.

Please leave your comments – what did you like and what you didn’t on that video?

Thanks!