Yule Love It!: Songs of the Winter Château Book III [48:35]
01) The Night Before Christmas
02) Hark The Herald Angels Sing
03) We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing
04) Angels from the Realms of Glory
05) Angels We Have Heard on High
06) Joy to the World
07) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
08) Once in Royal David’s City
09) Gather Around The Tree
10) Light The Advent Candle
11) Oh Come Oh Come Immanuel
12) One Bright Star
13) It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
14) Toyland
15) Boars Head Carol
16) Exidus
17) Come Little Children
18) In the Bleak Mid Winter
19) Star of Christmas Morning
20) How Quietly
21) Candlelight Carol
22) Lo How Rose E’er Blooming
23) The First Noel
24) A Child A King
25) Oh Come All Ye Faithful
26) Alleluia Acclamation Christmas
27) Bring A Torch Jeanette Isabella
I’m releasing this one a little bit early…but late November isn’t “too early”…
I still have to get the video exhibition put together for this one, at the time of this writing…I’m confident I’ll have it done by early December.
I should point out…this album was actually started just shortly after completion of “Yule in Strings”…But it got shelved for a long, long time…And I had a collection of tracks I wasn’t entirely pleased with…I pruned a few of those away, and probably should have taken at least one other out…but…I’m pleased with what is here.
I was beginning to wonder if I’d have this completed by Yule time…I’m happy to put out another alternative version [a la “Yule in Strings”] of this series…but, I’d been promising the third installment for at least a year now…so, I needed to get this done.
Unfortunately, as happens sometimes when a project gets shelved…sometimes you forget what you was doing, and you wander off the path a bit…and there are two different styles of track on this album…Several are of a more typical acoustic piano…and all the rest are “Baby Grand”…and the difference is obvious…I wanted to keep these albums as uniform as possible…Guess I didn’t.
I trust this will hinder no ones enjoyment of the album.
As to this series of albums…I set out to make a trilogy, and this is the third…
…Of course, there’s lots to do with alternate versions of the music already covered…I expect a second “Yule in Strings” at some point…and an orchestral album…plus a church organ album…If I can come up with something I find release worthy…I may even play around with the choir synthesizer…and I’ve got a few nice tracks with the Celtic harp…a few other synthesizers I’ve never even tried, are just waiting for me…
…I’ve got some stragglers, however…I don’t think I’m going to release most of the tracks I’ve pulled [over not liking how they turned out]…but I’ve still got some material I haven’t even loaded up yet, to see what I can do with it…There’s still a bit of fertile ground to dance upon…
…Which means there might be a small “encore” album, in the future…I make no promises…
…except that I’ll rummage through what I already have on hand, and see how many albums I can make of them…They’ll likely be small…like, ten or so tracks…But I’ll be releasing things, well into the future…
Songs of the Winter Château: Yule in Strings – The Mt. Gillis Bard Does Yule [51:22]
01) Sing We Noel [Spanish Guitar]
02) The Huron Carol [acoustic guitar]
03) Sweet Chiming Bells [acoustic guitar]
04) Sussex Carol [guitar]
05) Stay With Us [acoustic guitar]
06) I Saw Three Ships [Spanish Guitar]
07) The Snow Lay On The Ground [spanish guitar]
08) Pat a Pan [guitar]
09) Jingle Bells [acoustic guitar]
10) The Christmas Song [acoustic guitar]
11) I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day [Spanish Guitar]
12) Deck the Halls [acoustic guitar]
13) Here Comes Santa Clause [acoustic guitar]
14) White Christmas [acoustic guitar]
15) Carol of the Birds [guitar]
16) Veni Veni [acoustic guitar]
17) Still Still Still [guitar]
18) Wesford Carol [acoustic guitar]
19) Rockin Around The Christmas Tree [spanish guitar]
20) The Coventry Carol [acoustic guitar]
21) Oh Christmas Tree [acoustig guitar]
22) There’s A Song In The Air [Spanish Guitar]
23) The Friendly Beasts [Spanish Guitar]
24) Let It Snow [acoustic guitar]
25) O Sanctissima [acoustic guitar]
26) See Amid The Winters Snow [acoustic guitar]
27) Christmas Canon [acoustic guitar]
I honestly wanted this to be the fourth album [and potentially divided into two or three albums], but “Songs of the Winter Château: Book III” remains in it’s infancy…and I had all these alternate guitar tracks on hand.
At this late in the game, I’m not going to be able to crank out an entirely new holiday album.
It’s been a hard year…I’ll try to get back to work on Book III, and release it in 2017…Potentially, I may aim for a shorter album…and maybe you’ll get a Book IV and Book V because of this. Book III is, essentially, supposed to be the final piano holiday album.
On the whole, Yule in Strings is a nice album…Maybe I should have pruned a few tracks away…but, there’s nothing here that is especially hard to listen to.
01) In The Still Of The Night (Piano-Concert-Hall)
02) Heart of Gold (Acoustic Guitar)
03) Dust in the Wind [acoustic guitar]
04) Bard [acoustic piano]
05) Athair (acoustic piano)
06) Forgotten [piano]
07) Andys Song [acoustic piano concert hall]
Just That Way is officially album number eleven, in my normal series. It was supposed to be released in 2015…but it got sidelined, by my finishing up work on Songs of the Winter Chateau: Book II. So, now it is the first release of 2016…and a fine release it is.
The style, quality and flow of this album puts it in the realm with Faces of Time, A Personal Affair and Into the Night…Which makes it a return to my favorite style of album…It’s more personal.
There is a little bit of repeat, in terms of songs…but, not to much. This is mostly new content…and all have never before been released, in the form they appear here…brand new track releases.
I’m going to forgo my usual commentary…because even though some of these tracks are a walk down memory lane…I’m going to be moving away, from making these album posts have a lot of commentary.
I like this album…It is a worthy addition to my catalogue. I hope you enjoy it.
Note: It seems everytime I do something especially big, there is always a gremlin in the system presenting itself. At the time of this posting [December 01, 2015], the native WordPress media player is behaving in ways it’s not supposed to. Now I’m even noticing that it sometimes isn’t playing the correct track. It might be best to just skip to the bottom of this post, and follow those directions. Hopefully, they fix this soon. Oh!…as a practical word of advice wherever media is concerned, it doesn’t hurt to load up the specific post, where media is embedded.
Frontiers for the Holidays: Songs of the Winter Château Book II [46:18]
01) Christmas Canon
02) O Sanctissima
03) Have a Holly Jolly Xmas
04) Oh Christmas Tree
05) I Saw Three Ships
06) The Friendly Beasts
07) Sing We Noel
08) Walking In The Air
09) There’s A Song In The Air
10) Once Upon a Christmas
11) I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day
12) Here Comes Santa Claus
13) Zion Hort Die Wachter Singen
14) Veni Veni
15) The Christmas Song
16) See Amid The Winters Snow
17) Stay With Us
18) Sweet Chiming Bells
19) Ding Dong Merrily On High
20) It Was a Starry Night
This is my second holiday album. I hope you enjoy it.
At the time I am posting this, the wordpress audio player has been acting strangely, and going on to play audio tracks it’s not supposed to play. I’m hoping they’ll have this fixed, by the time this album gets posted. If not, it may be more practical to find the holiday playlist, way down on the right side of this blog. You can listen to both albums, one after the other…and just let it play on it’s own. Or you can pick specific tracks to listen to.
The holiday playlist will only be available during the holiday season.
Anomaly is my tenth musical album. It is just a hair under eighteen minutes long.
Stylistically, it is not unlike “Blue Threw It All”. In fact, I put these tracks together during the same time period…So, “Blue Threw It All” and “Anomaly” are sister albums.
I think they both turned out really nice.
01) Anomaly – It sounds nice.
02) Oberland – Again…A nice sounding track.
03) Recompense – Interesting, different track.
04) Overprone – Techno style.
05) Romaji – Nice…Honestly not a bad track.
06) Stellarator – It’s okay.
07) Vernus Savant – I saved the best for last. This one rocks.
Blue Threw It All is my ninth official, normal album…It spans 17 minutes and 7 seconds. This collection is very up beat and “techno” in flavor. Personally, I like how this turned out.
01) Argon – Great, strong track to start off with.
02) Electrical – A loop…weak as “a song”, but still cool.
03) Hyperion – Another good track.
04) Bejabers – An outlier with this collection, slightly…This one has it’s own flavor and style. It’s a favorite.
05) Demirelief – Cool track.
06) Evocation – Cool track.
07) Scepter – Pretty good stuff.
08) Cathectic – Not my favorite track of the album…but a decent way to bring things to a close.
Before you dread the question, “Is Stevie scraping the bottom of the barrel?”…Let me assure you, this album is more of a sideline project. You see…I happened across a reservoir of old music I’d put together…some for specific projects…some I just sat on, and never did anything with…One or two of these tracks, conceivably, I may have even made with MAGIX Music Maker 10…which was the first version I ever purchased a copy of. Most of this content, I had no recollection of encoding a WAV or MP3 copy of…Or if I did, I figured I had lost them somewhere along the line. So, I was quite surprised to find these tracks.
I am referring to Throwback as my 8.5th album, because I didn’t intend for it to exist…and it’s a weak collection, over all…I could have appended these to The Black List [my first album, which I also did not originally intend to make]…but there was enough here, to where I thought it was worth the effort to put it out as a tiny album.
At twelve minutes and five seconds, you breeze through this collection pretty fast. What is here, is a look back at things I was putting together and publishing really early on. I probably had about seventeen or eighteen tracks I’d retrieved…but I whittled it down to mostly the best, with a few decent loops thrown in…These tracks are basically just loops, to be honest…And I should stress, this was really early on…I’d not developed all that far at doing this…So, most of this is “Meh!” type stuff…But it’s an okay part of my musical history.
I wanted this album to be longer, but figured it had enough mediocre loops…and I did not want it to “over stay it’s welcome”…So, I opted to drop several tracks, since what made it in really does adequately represent the tracks that didn’t make it in.
There’s not a lot of greatness here…but I did toss in one genuine gem.
I should forewarn…that I had to “patch” several of these together, so that I’d have a version that plays for more than 15 to 30 seconds…On a few of these tracks, though I tried to get it right [it can be hard], there is a noticeable “something” where one part ends and another picks up…It’s part of the headache, of working with solitary WAV and MP3 files that have been made with obsolete music software…and I cant just import the arrangement files they were made with, to recode from the original source…So, there are a few imperfections here.
01) Veneration – Kind of cool…This reminds me of the unlisted track at the end of Def Leppard’s Pyromania. It’s just something I came up with, while goofing around. Not at all a song.
02) Fluorine – I didn’t bother doing anything with this…I just included it here, as it was. I’ve never made anything like this since.
03) CultureShock-V1 – A fact only ever known by me…”CultureShock V4″ is titled such, because there were three versions which preceded it…and the very first attempt, was something totally different from what originally debuted as “The Culture Shock Podcast” theme…This is the original, never before released version.
04) Curio – Bumper music…but really cool bumper music…You cant possibly not like this.
05) MA Today – I had a YouTube series called “MA Today” [Minor Attraction Today]…Pronounced by it’s proper lettering, “em aye today”…Yes, that was creative wasn’t it?…I could not possibly neglect inclusion of this track here…Plus, it’s not bad.
06) Funky1 – A great piece of bumper music.
07) Cerebrum – I was messing around with a synthesizer on this one…Not amazing, but sounds alright…An early example of my attempts at making original music.
08) Circumflex – I remember making this…That particular synthesizer got taken out of the MAGIX Music Maker suite, I think by the fourteenth release…I kind of miss it, to be honest.
09) Moirai – A nice track…if a bit eerie…I put a bit of work into it.
10) Media Whore – I was going to hold this one back for a later album…but, this is an old piece of music I put together…I think it’s the first thing I ever created, that was honestly really good…In fact, this particular track is kind of awesome. It saves this collection from being more less neutered. I was going to put some vocal recordings to this, but never did…I could easily envision this track going well, with a “rampage” style of rapping.