Mazurka "La Tenerezza"

  1. Martin Jonas
    Martin Jonas
    I have recorded five tunes yesterday, all of which we played with our group at this week's gathering: a Scottish air, a contra dance waltz, a bluegrass waltz, a chorus from a Mendelssohn oratorio and this one, an Italian mazurka. Variety keeps it interesting!

    A. Quintavale: Mazurka "La Tenerezza" (Tenderness)
    Published by G. De Stefano, Philadelphia, 1920


    This is another of the Italian-American dance tunes collected and uploaded by Sheri Mignano in her Dropbox folders for Cafe members. For easy reference, I have reposted them here:

    https://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/a...8&d=1659308413
    https://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/a...9&d=1659308428

    For this particular tune, Sheri has also provided a vintage audio recording. No information on artists or recording date. Reposted on the understanding it's 1920s/30s and public domain:



    1898 Giuseppe Vinaccia mandolin (x2)
    Vintage Viaten tenor guitar


    https://youtu.be/MMhIxmW09dY

    Martin
  2. Gelsenbury
    Gelsenbury
    That brightened my Monday morning!
  3. Christian DP
    Christian DP
    And my early afternoon!
  4. Mandolin Deep Cuts
    Mandolin Deep Cuts
    I really liked this tune. Thank you for sharing. I will record it myself!
  5. Martin Jonas
    Martin Jonas
    Thanks, Dennis and Christian, and enjoy playing the tune MDC! It's a fun tune and it's very helpful having the 1920s (?) vintage recording as a guide to the ideom and phrasing. The tempo is quite brisk, but most of the runs fall nicely under the fingers. The main reason why the old recording is shorter than mine is not the tempo but the fact that they left out one of the repeats, possibly to fit it onto the acetate -- it's meant to be AABBACCA and the old record is AABBCCA.

    Martin
  6. Mandolin Deep Cuts
    Mandolin Deep Cuts
    This song was stuck in my head all day yesterday after seeing this post. I recorded 30 seconds of it and here is what I ended up with.

    This is the final result in my digital audio workstation. I couldn't get the tremolo to sound nice unless I doubled the track without tremolo and cut the tremolo by half volume.


    You'll see I doubled each instrument and had my octave just play the bass note of the guitar. I am lazy and didn't want to make those guitar stretches on my octave.

    I don't really know what I'm doing and am new to recording. Thanks for the earworm! Here it is!



  7. Frithjof
    Frithjof
    Beautiful recording, Martin. Sounds very Italian! Many thanks not only for the link to the sheet music but also for embedding the one century old recording. I’m surprised to hear the voices divided to left and right channel.

    Fine playing in your short recording too, MDC! Hope we have you here more often now.
  8. Martin Jonas
    Martin Jonas
    Thanks, Frithjof. I hadn't noticed the voices were separated in the old recording -- hadn't listened on headphones. That may mean that it's more recent than I thought. Sheri kindly included a folder called "Italian Vintage Audio Recordings" in her Dropbox, of which this is one. I think these are mainly private non-commercial recordings from the San Francisco mandolin scene, with a few 1920s commercial releases on 78s. In that folder, there is a spreadsheet with annotations and performer/recording details. Some are annotated as recorded between the 1910s to 1930s on metal discs, others are dated from the 1950s to 1970s, presumably originally on tape, and one or two are very recent. However, the MP3 for "La Tenerezza" has no annotation at all, neither a date nor a performer, so I assume it's old enough that provenance has become lost.

    MDC: we've already exchanged PMs -- sounds very nice!

    Martin
  9. John Kelly
    John Kelly
    Interesting to see your DAW screen here and relate it to the sound clip, MDC. Which DAW are you using for your multi-tracking? A fine sound whatever it is.
  10. Mandolin Deep Cuts
    Mandolin Deep Cuts
    Thanks @Frithjof, @Martin, and @John! I do want to say a special thanks to @Martin for helping me with some of the technical issues of posting here. @John, I am using FL Studio. A buddy of mine does a lot of electronic music, and I decided I would use the same DAW as him so I could bug him for assistance when needed as I'm learning. Each track has a tiny bit of reverb, time correction, EQ, and I did some barebones compression over the master in order to raise volume levels. It took about an hour to get 30 seconds of music haha. But I'm learning!
  11. Simon DS
    Simon DS
    Nice one Martin and nice tune as well, many thanks.

    MDC, looks very technical, well done but unfortunately I can’t hear it.
  12. Martin Jonas
    Martin Jonas
    My setup is rather more low-tech: here is the screenshot of my Audacity mixing window for this tune. Three tracks: the original audio from my video recording (first mandolin), plus overdubbed tenor guitar and second mandolin. A little bit of added reverb on the two mandolin tracks. First mandolin panned 10% to the right and +7 dB volume adjusted, second mandolin panned 20% to the left and +3dB, tenor guitar centre and -2dB.



    Martin
  13. Simon DS
    Simon DS
    Looks interesting Martin, I've always wanted to add reverb, but often I’ve thought that reverb-ed traffic noise in the background would be too distracting.
    Apparently there is a similar set up for iPhones with GarageBand but I find it impairs my recording experience.

    Thinking about it now, there’s probably a way to record three or four tracks using overdubbing and a minimum of about eight clicks using presets. The clicks would be to decide which tracks are good takes.
    One thing that really surprised me is that now I am using a Zoom recorder, it takes four or five times as long to upload to YouTube. I'm guessing this is because audio track is so heavy, or good quality I should say. Not sure what that quality becomes on YouTube though. It's funny because here in England I'm using a really good set of headphones so I can actually hear the difference in quality.
    I really liked the fact that when I was learning to play the mandolin the only device I had to record was an iPhone which has a similar recording quality as any other Mobile telephone. The recordings weren't great but we're simple to do.
    This gave me a lot more time to play scales.
  14. Simon DS
    Simon DS
    …..
  15. Mandolin Deep Cuts
    Mandolin Deep Cuts
    Here is an updated version of La Tenerezza! For this updated version, I recorded the rest of the song since my original version only had 30 seconds. I removed a bit of reverb, and mixed it so you only hear the tremolo track when it's time to tremolo. I think this makes the eight-note runs a little bit clearer. I also copied the original recording and panned the first part 20% to the left and the second part 20% to the right. The octave mandolin remains centered.



    Are you able to hear it @Simon? If not let me know, and I can email you if you're interested. To your questions on reverb, I definitely don't add any effects while I am actively recording. This increases latency and the strain on your computer while you're recording, and since I'm not using fancy hardware, by the time I'm hearing a backing track from my computer, what's being recorded is slightly ahead. It becomes a mess. So I just record to a click track. I record probably 20 takes for each track, pushing spacebar to record, and then spacebar to stop. Each time I start a new recording, it's put onto a different track in my software that I can't hear until I review them. Once it's all done I choose the best one I like (or parts I like), slice and dice them up and then arrange them accordingly in the screen you see above. Then I add a tad bit of reverb, timing correction, and compression. I hope that helps!
  16. Jairo Ramos
    Jairo Ramos
    Because I'm not very interested in discussions about the technical quality of the recordings in the forum, I only dare to comment on the quality of the performer: and in my humblest opinion, what I hear is the interpretation of someone with the highest technical quality, a real pleasure to listen to him and I sincerely hope to continue listening to more of his productions...
  17. Frithjof
    Frithjof
    The result of your recording process sounds great, MDC!
  18. John Kelly
    John Kelly
    Fine playing, MDC. You have done a good job on the mixing of the tracks and getting them in sync with each other.

    Simon, re your comment about the Zoom recordings taking much longer to upload to YT. You may have the recorder set to record in WAV format which has a huge file size compared to mp3 format. My Tascam has this ability and when I use it to record tunes for my videos I always convert them to mp3 at the mixing stage to get a smaller file size - my internet connection is very slow in my rural part of Scotland. There is a drop in quality but the YouTube upload process degrades the quality of the upload anyway, visually and aurally. On my laptop. using REAPER as my DAW, I record in WAV format and any tracks recorded on the Tascam in WAV format are loaded in to REAPER as WAVs before I do the mixing and final processing. This final mix is then rendered to mp3 for using in my videos.
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