Holiday in Spain
By Jim
03/31/2006
I wanted to do a song by the Counting Crows. I play a few on the piano fairly often: Sullivan Street, Murder of One, Round Here - but I thought it was time for something different. I picked Holiday in Spain because it is a fairly simple song and one that I really enjoy. If I have to learn a song from scratch, let it be simple and enjoyable.
This is my 18th recording (since I started in mid-January 2006), but I still have a lot to learn. On this song, I repeated a mistake I've made several times in the past, most notably on Sister Golden Hair, which is that I neglected to set the tempo exactly right before recording. Try and change the tempo after recording a Midi file, and the Midi file will happily speed up or slow down accordingly. That is great if you mean to do that, but not so good if you want the recorded stuff to remain at the recorded tempo, but you need to set the overall tempo to a different value for something trivial, for instance, like the drums. I'm sure there is a way to do it (other than bouncing the track to a wav file), but I don't know what it is right now. The result is, I played the drums on the keyboard but only used a bass drum and tambourine. Plus a cymbal at the pause, which should have started softly and grown in velocity through the measure. It doesn't - I know how to increase the velocity of notes, but the cymbal doesn't seem to follow the same rules.
I didn't add what sounds like a mandolin, and the guitar solo is done with a nylon string acoustic guitar. Other than that, I think it came out OK.
No Big Yellow Taxi, either.
My niece will probably forgive me for messing with the Counting Crows. One day.
Voices: Piano, Bass, Strings, Guitar, Drums, Tambourine.
Click here to listen: