Seems like this might be the perfect Christmas to spend time with that Dr. Seuss character, The Grinch. If you remember correctly from your own childhood, the message of the Grinch's story is that it doesn't take presents to make the day Christmas ... and that may turn out to be a useful concept this year, in particular.

The title of this mix, The Illuminated Grinchmas, is a reference to the illuminated manuscripts of olden days ... the monks who copies books in the days before mechanical printing chose to paint various lovely embellishments on the page, illuminating the Word with beauty to delight the eye and clarify the moral of the story. In much the same way, I've added musical embellishments to this dramatic reading of The Grinch, to assist in creating the mental picture that the story seeks to paint for you ...

Speaking of ancient things, the voice of this story is Boris Karloff, whose classical training as an actor results in a richly modulated (some might almost say 'plummy') reading of the text ... I've probably heard it 100 times now, and it only gets better with repetition.

As for the embellishments, you'll hear bits and pieces of old and new Christmas tunes from the Yuji Ohno Trio, Starchillaz, Cala Santa, Rudolph & Blitzen, Tchaikovsky, the Highway Jazzmen, Philip Aaberg, John Fahey, Jan Garbarek / The Hilliard Ensemble and Neurobic.

It's a short piece, but I hope you find it sweet ...

This message has been edited. Last edited by: MadameFLY,

A technical note on the Illumination ...

This source version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas came complete with a lot of its own incidental music under the narration as well as complete songs at various points ... so the embellishments that I wanted to add had to be woven in amongst any of the existing music that was worth keeping (a lot was not worth keeping ....)

My approach was to use the source Grinch as (after the introductory piece) the only Primary track in the mix ... every track used as an embellishment was an Overlay on that track, like so:



Naturally, I had to create this mix in MixMeister Studio 6, in order to work with an unlimited number of overlays. I started out making the mix in Studio 7 and quickly ran into the overlay limit that arises out of the timeline's "8 strips maximum" graphic display ...

The trade-off in using v.6 would, of course, be a diminution in sound quality, but because all the overlay tracks were Standard instead of Beat-matched (e.g., no time stretching) there's nothing here to hurt the ears.

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it doesn't take presents to make the day Christmas ... and that may turn out to be a useful concept this year, in particular.

LOL ... even though this shouldn't be funny!

Catching this mix almost from the beginning

As to this point:

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Naturally, I had to create this mix in MixMeister Studio 6, in order to work with an unlimited number of overlays. I started out making the mix in Studio 7 and quickly ran into the overlay limit that arises out of the timeline's "8 strips maximum" graphic display ...

In Fusion, clear playlist, add Primary track (Grinch), add seven Overlays tracks and arrange them to fit the Primary track, and then cut the original Grinch track and add it again with a simple cut Transition ... you'll have another seven slots free for overlays, and you can repeat this process as often as you want. In other words, you can work with as many overlays as you want with just one single Primary track, you only have to reinsert the Primary track at least every eighth Playlist item.

PS: Very nice work with the music fills in between the audio book samples!!! Would be nice to know what music you have chosen...

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Originally posted by Moto:

As to this point:

quote:

Naturally, I had to create this mix in MixMeister Studio 6, in order to work with an unlimited number of overlays. I started out making the mix in Studio 7 and quickly ran into the overlay limit that arises out of the timeline's "8 strips maximum" graphic display ...

In Fusion, clear playlist, add Primary track (Grinch), add seven Overlays tracks and arrange them to fit the Primary track, and then cut the original Grinch track and add it again with a simple cut Transition ... you'll have another seven slots free for overlays, and you can repeat this process as often as you want. In other words, you can work with as many overlays as you want with just one single Primary track, you only have to reinsert the Primary track at least every eighth Playlist item.

Excellent idea, Tom ... I will try that next time.

What happened was that I started getting volume marker anomalies on the timeline as well as those "unintended segment breaks" that I have (I think) posted about before in the Studio 7 Bugs section of the Forum ... I was concerned that I was going to make my project unworkable so I jumped ship and went to v.6 ...

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Originally posted by Moto:

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it doesn't take presents to make the day Christmas ... and that may turn out to be a useful concept this year, in particular.

LOL ... even though this shouldn't be funny!

Actually considering this headline from Reuters earlier today, it looks like the Grinch really did steal Christmas this year:

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No Christmas cheer as recession gathers steam