D’Anglebert Prelude
January 23rd, 2010
As a followup to last week’s allemande, I’ve recorded the prelude from the same suite. I adore unmeasured preludes! If ever there was something that was purely harpsichord music, it would be these. They make the instrument ring in a way that nothing else can! And I love having the freedom to do almost whatever I want with it.
Unfortunately, this makes it almost impossible to play it the same way twice – I considered editing a few sections together for this recording (some parts are not easy!), but decided that would really be a last resort. Finding two takes that fit together technically and musically would be a bigger challenge than just playing the whole thing through!
Speaking of the recording, I have an almost identical setup as I did last week: two Oktava MK-012s, angled at about 90°, four feet or so off the floor, maybe 8 feet away from the harpsichord. Is this the best arrangement? Probably not – suggestions are welcome! I plug it all into a Tascam US-122 which connects to my laptop, and then record and edit everything using Ardour running on Ubuntu linux. Yay for free software!
The only thing I changed for this recording is to tweak the equalizer settings a little bit – the harpsichord’s mighty bass doesn’t really come through on the recording, so I nudged it up just a little.
[audio:https://jono.redowl.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/2010-01-23-danglebert-d-prelude.mp3]
MP3 Download
