Hi Pam,

Thanks for taking a listen, and I'm glad you enjoyed it.

There was quite bit of 'fiddling' going on when I put this together, (approx 18 years ago). I try to play stuff at actual speed, as I've tried playing things in slower, then speeding up, but find the tune then takes on a mechanical, overly-quantised feel to it. Although I've always had nimble fingers, there's no way I could play that tune today though!

I would have started this one by putting down the left hand piano part, with the aid of the keyboard metronome. The main melody, now strings, I originally intended for a solo violin however, I find the T2 one very weak so revoiced for marcato. I needed a 'fast acting' string sound due to the little trills here and there. The harpsichord parts were originally played on piano, before getting revoiced. All the bass parts were added after the piano/harpsichord parts.

Even with tunes where I've used both hands to play the piano part, I will often take the track into Cubase, and split the left hand from the right, (which is very easy to do.) This comes in very handy at mixing time. I also do it with drum parts, handy for toning down the volume of a bass drum for instance.

The bit in the middle where it slows down (rall.), was another 'fiddle', as I needed to pick up the correct tempo again, so this was done purely in Cubase. The original piano solo doesn't slow down here, but I wanted this in for effect. As for the rest of the tune, I can't remember now, but I would probably have used a bit of gentle quantising, just to keep everything pulled in together.

I prefer to play at actual tempo, then go back and correct the errors, (and these days there are many!), as I believe it's much more natural sounding. The beauty of multi-tracking is it allows you to concentrate on the right hand, without having to worry about the left, thereby letting you play a piece you might struggle with, if having to use both hands at the same time. However, it follows that if you were putting something down like Moonlight Sonata or something, then this would have to be approached in the 'normal' way, i.e. with both hands and metronome turned off, and all extra instruments would need to follow the piano part.

Sorry for the long-winded reply but, for the benefit of anyone new to multi-tracking, just thought I'd try and explain how this was put together.

Best regards,

Paul