More on these FREE PLAY STYLESI have been experimenting with FREEPLAY STYLES, and found one I like called
Ethereal 2 done by Eileen (from the PSR Tutorial Website). I had considered using
Ethereal Voices, which is one of the default ones I have ..
but that has no Bass! Eileen's does .. a strong bass. This says on it 4/4 and a TEMPO of 80. Freeplay Styles seem to have a 'measure' of 32 bars before they repeat. I can't understand why a Freeplay Style should have
any 'structure', as I thought the whole idea of a Freeplay Style was that it was a backing for you to play 'freely' with. I wanted to play
Handel's Largo, and that is in 3/4 time. Ethereal 2 has some 'wha-wha' in the backing (so does have
some 'structure'!) which I wanted to hear, so to bring this out I have put the
TEMPO up to 120bpm.
Now, as my Freeplay Style has
no rhythm and I want to
hear 3 beats in a bar when I play Handel's Largo .. but not in a 'rigid' fashion .. I decided that I could get my left hand to do that by allocating a
LEFT HAND VOICE. I wanted a left hand voice that was 'percussive' so it would pick up the movement of my left hand .. ie. I am not just 'holding' chords down. I tried a piano voice, but that was too dominant, and in the end found one called
Sinesphere.
I have chosen
WhisperGallery for R1. This is a sort of 'whistle' that lags behind the melody being played, which gives quite an attractive sound.
Then in R2 I have
AmbientPiano, which being a percussive instrument plays the melody quite prominently.
I am not using R3 (Vibraphone) so that is a hangover from another song. And top left, SONG = Beautiful Dreamer also has no bearing on the setup I am using! And I'm not using the MultiPads.
So this is what I have set up, and you can see the
Volumes for the balance at the bottom.
I have also turned all the
PARTS of the Style to
OFF apart from
BASS and
CHORD 1.
Click the below to listen to how my Handel's Largo has turned out using the setup above.
This is the sheet music I used to play this piece.
If the PDF file does not show, refresh the page .. or click on the LINK underneath to load it.
http://ar-group.org/Files/Handel'sLargo.pdfWhen you have the music up full screen (click on the
Pop-out arrow top right corner of the music screen), if you hover your mouse near the top there is are options to
Download and
Print the music. You can then print it out if you want to try playing it.
Yes, I did have the sheet music up in front of me while I was playing it .. but, as I don't read music, not to read the dots on lines (ie. the actual notes being played). I used to sing bass in a choir, so I was following the lengths of the notes in the bars, but playing the notes of the melody 'by ear'. And of course I was following the chords written over the music .. although it didn't take me long to remember them and not to have to look at the written chords.
If you want to try out the Freeplay Style I used you can download it from the Attachment below.
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