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Hi everyone,

As I shared with my brother Huu about my recent breakthrough in the understanding of a piece of a digital music software, FL Studio, he asked me if I could play and record Days of Elijah so he could use it as a background music at his church's website. For this piece I decided to use only two guitars: a steel string for the main melody line, and a nylon string for the rhythm parts. Here it is. It's not in its best form yet but I'm thrilled to share with you what I have now.

Note that all the following performances sound best when listened with a good pair of stereo headphones.

Days Of Elijah - version 2

Feb 15, 2009: I've just reworked the piece above using a different approach. Take a listen and I'll explain what the differences are.

Days Of Elijah - version 4 

Ok, here's the difference. In version 2, a guitar chord was played by stacking 3-5 layers of guitar samples in polyphony, but in version 4, a special MIDI note was sent to the guitar plugin which then calls up a single sound sample as recorded in the instrument. I believe the sound from the second scenario is much cleaner and clearer while the stacked version sounds muddy. In version 2, each chord may be made up of 5 notes that are played in unison but each note is sounded from a different guitar acoustic body. In version 4 each chord does sound like it is strummed from a single guitar.

Feb 15, 2009: The excellent "Pretty Amazing Grace" soundtrack created by anh Tuan for the Christmas 2008 inspired me to revisit the aformentioned software and used the very same song to see if I could create a believable soundtrack for it. Here it is:

Pretty Amazing Grace

It's the best I've ever done using this software which I purchased probably some time in 1995 or 96. However I was always wanting to emulate what Neil Diamond did in Pretty Amazing Grace: an amazing rhythm track using nothing but guitars. In this rendition I simply added a drum set. So "Days of Elijah" was my best immitation of Neil Diamond. For Days of Elijah I wrote all the various rhythm patterns as well as harmonies, basses, and manually inserted up/down and muted strumming for a pretty realistic performance.

Feb 23, 2009: Majesty - A special soundtrack created for Huu's upcoming TV or Radio ministries.

Majesty

March 14, 2010: Jesus Loves Me - duet by Theony and Carissa for practice by young kids for an Easter performance. It's so heartwarming listening to Theony and Carissa trying their best to sing the song in Vietnamese. Parents, if you like to hear your kids sing this song the way they do now, just download the track into your MP3 device, then let the kids listen with a pair of headphones while singing along into your video camera or whatever recording device. I can lay their voices on the backing track and render into MP3 and have the track posted here or preserve them until one day when they can play their previous performance back to their own kids.

This soundtrack is completed with a full drumkit, a melodious synth, and an arpeggiating classical guitar performed by me following a special chord progression I wrote for this song.

Jesus Loves Me

March 29, 2010: His Eye Is On The Sparrow - Inspired by Pastor Hien's request for a special performance following his sermon on the topic. This one is done with 3 FL Studio 9 tracks: 1) Sytrus synth for melody, 2) Sytrus synth for the root note of the current chord, and 3) Nylon Guitar soundfont for the accompanying grooves. Amazing lifelike performance using grooves purchased from tweedlybits.com and modified to match song's key, and timing for each measure's chords changed to match song's (very slow) tempo. I resorted to tweedlybits because there is no way I can program the sequencer (FL Studio 9) to mimic my actually playing. The tweedlybits MIDI is still a much cheaper alternative to a high quality MIDI guitar. Starting out with tweedlybits' MIDI notes velocity and real human timing I can then shift the keys and rhythms to match the expressive melodic line following the most pleasing chord progression while preserving real human feel already there in the original MIDI clips. The backing track played here probably matches a female vocal the best.

The beauty (and secrets that I probably should not share :) ) of the tweedlybits MIDI clips is that they were performed by professional artists who work with wellknown names such as The Funk, Amy Winehouse, Beyoncé, Ray Davies, Three Blind Mice, etc. It's quite a pleasant surprise to borrow their amazing picking or strumming of the guitar, or banging of keys on the keyboard, or the exquisite beats of the drums and percussions, and other performances on other instruments, as they were recorded into MIDI format by currently available MIDI recording instruments.

To perform this hymn I started out in the traditional way using my real physical classical nylon guitar and come up with a chord progression that fits my playing style, then I would enter the melody's notes into the sequencer using the piano roll, then lay down two sytrus rich ensemble tracks to play the melody and the chords' root or 5th notes,  then select from a myriad of professionally played MIDI grooves and paste them into the rhythm or groove track synthesized by a nylon guitar soundfont, then carefully rearrange them, shift individual notes into the current chord of the progression, taking great care to preserve the original MIDI note velocities, shift or scale them as a group trying your best to preserve the relationship, change their start time and duration to tailor them for your performance.

It's like you have JJ Bell guitar magic while whispering to his ears the notes, the chords, and he will exactly following your maestro baton and not giving up on his expressiveness. So for this rendition, the chord progression and the tempo is mine, but the notes in their varying strength, duration and timing as a group is JJ Bell's, except that each note's tone is shifted into the song's scale and chords. For this performance I happened to pick the key for female vocal. This is my best performance as of March 29, 2010.

His Eye Is On The Sparrow

God bless,

--nghi