A Purple First

For the purple project I have had several principles that I have worked to. There are probably some I don't realise, but some of the ones that are deliberate include no singing (entirely instrumental, maybe some odd speech or SFX) and a focus on a certain kind of music. Another principle has been that I have done everything myself.

I have broken that principle.  I intend to break it good and proper on this album and have guest musicians in several places. The first has actually happened - my wife has played some keyboards for me.

This is still working one the set of folk tunes (this section is taking some time) and I want alongside the mandolin to have accordion and fiddle. My wife did the tunes for me on a keyboard for the accordion sound. Accordion is one of those instruments where a MIDI keyboard and a sampler do a really realistic job, partly because it's a keyboard anyway on a piano accordion so it sounds like it's played naturally. You can't get so much nuance of squeezing pressure but these are fast tunes anyway.

My one-handed jeyboard playing is not too bad, and I could ahve learned to play them myself, but my wife is a proper piano player, and significantly for this is good at the changing hand position thing - these tunes have lots of that and that was what I was finding difficult.

Anyway that's it for this session