Midstream Progress Report - GloryGlory Dixieland is going slow

     Last post was detailing how I use Audible to help learn new songs by ear.  In it, the example was based on the song I'm currently learning, the University of Georgia's "Glory Glory Dixieland", a really jazzed up version of the "Battle Hymn of The Republic" as performed by the Redcoat Marching Band.  (If anybody wants to hear the source material, it's on Georgia Dogs.com - Songs of the Georgia Bulldogs.  Just scroll down to the Dixieland version.)

    I've known the song for years from church, and have always played it in a Southern Gospel style. The song is public domain, and I've already posted a Youtube version in my usual Southern Gospel style.  When I finished learning my last song, and was considering which song to play, Monique suggested this version.  It's been on my mind, because it's fun, and sounds a lot like southern gospel style, just revved up.   All I have to do is learn to play the song like the college band does, on a piano, at the same speed they play it, and record it for Youtube...   :^)

    Okay, maybe not that simple.    With my memory, I have to learn very small segments at a time.  Been working on it since early/mid August. It's now mid September, and I've learned about 45 seconds.  The full song is a bit over 2 minutes.  On the other hand, I managed to match the single-key melody line in the middle, all the way up to where they start singing "Glory, Glory Hallelujah", so it's mostly a matter of memorizing those elements, and figuring out the fingering.

    Another aspect is the speed of the song.  I've always tended to play too fast, but these kids are too much for me.  Either my age or the complexity of the song is too much. I can't keep up.  Dixieland and Southern Gospel sound similar in some ways, but there's a wide gulf between the details of the two styles.  Probably going to have to get the song as good as possible, and settle for the best speed manageable.  It had been my intention to make a video overlaying the band with the piano, to show that my arrangement follows the band's playing properly.  May have to give up that thought.  Haven't decided yet.

    What I HAVE been able to do, is due to Audacity. It's been a Godsend.  I'm trying to pluck a consistent melody line out of a New Orleans style rendition of an entire band playing all at once, to play on one piano, with only two hands.  There's no way I can match an entire band, so it's a matter of following the notes that stand out the most.  At times they're playing way too fast for me to hear individual notes, much less focus on a single melody line.  It's like they're hitting EVERY note except the melody, but so fast that it blends INTO a melody. 
    With Audacity, it's possible to isolate a segment and listen over and over for the dominant melody.  It's possible to slow the song down while keeping the same pitch.  It's kind of like a bionic replacement for bad hearing, bad memory, and slower hands.  Audacity makes it possible for me to learn and play like I used to; just in smaller stages, at a speed I can handle.   :^)

    When I post a new song, I usually print out the sheet music for people who want to learn. In this case, after I worked out most of the song by playing along in the same key the band uses (B-flat), I discovered some band-type instruments are natively tuned to B-flat, but read the sheet music in C.  It felt like I'd put a ton of work into something that may not be usable by anybody who might like my arrangement, and I was depressed about it.

That final complication just got solved a few minutes ago.  Since the band plays Glory Glory Dixieland in B-flat, I've been playing in that key while listening/learning.  (I'm usually key-of-C, but B-flat isn't too far off for me to learn.)  Googled transposition software just now, and found there are two I already have that can do the job:

    MuseScore 4 is free, and does a wonderful job converting Midi to sheet music.  It has two drawbacks for me, though.  First, it doesn't understand all my my playing.  It sometimes messes up on grace notes, which is kind of important in Southern Gospel piano, and sometimes plays the notes slightly out of sequence.  Kind of jumbled together at the wrong pace.  Second, it doesn't retain the Sustain pedal in the Midi files created in Ableton.  It's still excellent software, and free, but has limitations that won't work for me.  In all fairness, maybe my computer's just not keeping up when the notes are garbled, but that doesn't happen in every midi player.  Some players get it right, even on my computer.

    On the other hand, Notation Musician 4 is everything I want, but it's not free:

• It plays my style perfectly. 
• It plays back Ableton's midi files and retains the sustain. 
• It also converts midi into sheet music... and allows you to print the files.  
• And it can transpose sheet music, which I only discovered this morning.  :^)

    It does far more, but these are my requirements.  No free software met all of the first three requirements.  Most paid software was either out of my price range, and/or didn't offer a free trial with the features I needed unlocked so there was no way to test it. 
    Notation Musician was still out of my price range.  But I absolutely knew it worked perfectly for my needs because they have a free trial.  It was almost $100, so I had to wait a few months, but it was worth every penny once I bought it.  And now I know how to transpose with it, so it's even better!

With all that said, I'm still not sure how much longer learning the song is going to take.  Making satisfactory progress (just slow).  But it's been so long since posting anything, I wanted to let all my readers and fans (Hi Monique!) know I'm still here!

Meeting In The Air Southern Gospel on Piano

  

Click to download:
Meeting In The Air Sheet Music

Meeting In The Air MIDI File

     This marks the 2nd new Southern Gospel song posted since re-starting this blog.  Meeting In The Air is an old old favorite.  I loved to sing this in church when I was a kid.  It's one of the songs I can clearly remember from church, from Uncle Freil playing, and from playing it myself.

    The song's original copyright was in 1925, and is currently under the Public Domain.  It was written by Mae Taylor Roberts.  According to Hymnary, the copyright notice originally contained this offer:  "This song may be had in sheet music at 25 cents a copy. Order from Mrs. Mae T. Roberts, 1554, East Washington, Pasadena, California."  Since that was nearly a century ago, I sincerely doubt she's still honoring her offer.
    I've looked for more information or songs from Mae Taylor Roberts, but couldn't find anything beyond the small amount Hymnary has.  If you'd like the lyrics, Hymnary offers 3 verses plus chorus.  I've seen it in the past with 4 verses, but usually consider Hymnary to be the most reliable source of hymn information.

    Speaking of verses, I took the road less traveled this time.  Most of the time, I'll do two or three verses with a chorus between each. This time around, I had an example to follow.  I recently found several decades-old videos of my uncle Freil playing.  This was one of the songs, so I had the rare opportunity to compare my version to his.  For his version of the song, he simply played the verses three times.  Didn't play the chorus at all.  It never occurred to me that could be an option; plus, I liked that a lot, so I'm following his lead and just playing three verses.  

    Also, not surprising at all... his way of playing Meeting in the Air is much better than mine.  I tend to play a very direct melody line.  Freil had a subtler approach.  He wound in and around the melody line, in ways that would never have occurred to me, lending his variations a much more sophisticated feel.

    With some effort (okay, a lot of effort), I listened to his version of Meeting in the Air over and over, working on learning how he did it.  Unless you're very familiar with Friel's style, you probably won't hear the difference.  But for those of us who knew him, it's there.  The first and last verses are my style.  The middle verse is as close to how he played the song as I can get.  The difference blurs a bit, because over time, fiddling with the arrangement, some of  his style blended with mine.  That's fabulous, because I'd love to be able to play more like Freil.

    Regardless, I'm happy with the arrangement.  I can tell what's mine and what's Freil's, and love the fact that even after all these years, I'm still learning from him.  

    The video itself is a whole other story.  I have a new (outdated, but new to me) cell phone, and struggled with the settings.  It has problems with the audio.  It sounds like it's playing underwater, with strangely distorted sounds, and halfway through the video the audio stops entirely.  My final attempt was with the lower resolution setting turned on.  It was the best version I'd played, out of several hours of trying to fix the video.  By that point my hands ached, and I was getting tired to the point of starting to play worse, rather than better.  So I took that final effort as 'best effort' and called it done.  The playing is fair enough, but the lower resolution makes the video itself disappointing.
    I'd like to fix the audio issue, or at least figure out what's going on.  But... the video plays with perfect timing, and I never use the original audio anyway.  I always use Ableton to record while playing, export it as a Wav file, and overlay the Wav on top of the original video's audio track.  It's cleaner than the original audio, with none of the ambient noise, barking dogs, etc.  So, the odd audio isn't an issue in this particular situation.  At least, not for making these piano videos.

        I've been working on this for a couple of months (or longer).  It would have been easy enough to do a simple arrangement in the key of C.  That's always been my wheelhouse.  But for these videos, I try to change up the keys a little, and offer greater variation in each verse.  With age and covid affecting my memory, it takes longer to get comfortable with an arrangement I like, and my ability to play it perfectly is based more on good luck, no matter how much I practice.  So, please pardon any errors.  The style is there, clearly enough that other pianists can take inspiration from the style and arrangement.  Aside from the actual video of me playing the piano... there's also a "how-to" video using Midiano (see sidebar link to Midiano) to play the song at normal speed, and half speed.  

    In addition to the how-to, the Midi file for Meeting In The Air is available on this page for download.  You can download the file, go to Midiano and play it, which comes with a variety of options that will help in learning to play the song.  You don't have to use Midiano, any Midi player is fine, but I don't know of any free player that can do everything that Midiano does.  Actually, I don't know of any better midi player at all, paid or free. 

     If you read sheet music, a pdf file is also available for download.  All the downloads are available for free, on this page.  (At some point I'll consider adding appropriate affiliate ads, maybe a "buy me a coffee" link, but as of this moment, haven't looked into them yet.)    But even then, there's no obligation, no charge to download.   Get the files, enjoy them, but if you share them, please credit me for the arrangement.  :^)

    

Stepping On the Clouds: How to Play Southern Gospel Style

Click HERE to go to the original blog post with free downloadable Midi and Sheet Music.

     In the past week, the final piece of the puzzle dropped into place.  Music Notation 4 was the finishing touch.  In the original Grace Notes, there were multiple elements with each new song:

• The actual video, playing the song on piano (Yamaha DG-640 back then)
• A How To video, with sheet music and animated keyboard showing what keys to play
• A free downloadable Midi file of the song
• A free downloadable version of the sheet music

    That took a full toolbox of software (plus a keyboard).  Over the years, the Yamaha quit working for me, and was replaced with an M-Audio Hammer 88.  It's a beautiful keyboard with a great feel, but has no built-in audio.  Strictly a Midi controller.  It came with Ableton as the DAW.  The main computer was my Swiss army knife, but Ableton didn't play well with the other installed software.  It took getting a dedicated laptop to make Ableton and the Hammer 88 work consistently.  And even then, I wound up needing an external audio driver (Also M-Audio, as are the speakers.)  Ableton creates the initial Midi, Notation Musician cleans it up a bit.
    Originally, I used the Flip line of digital video recorders, and later a more sophisticated digital camera.  Eventually, cell phones improved to the point I now shoot the videos on my phone.  Nothing special, just a slightly outdated Android.  Got a cheap mini tripod from Amazon that has flexible legs.  It can wrap around handy furniture or fixtures so I don't have to worry about getting an odd angle or knocking it off a shelf.  Bandicam was my screen video recording software.  Did a good job then... does a good job now.  I've kept it through at least three computers, and it just keeps on working.
    For regular video editing, I use HitFilm Express.  My needs are simple.  I mainly use it to replace the live piano audio from the original video (with all the household noises, barking dogs, etc...) with a WAV audio file generated by Ableton.  I sync the audio and video by the simply watching my fingers on the piano, and aligning the audio to match the movement.  It's like having my own private sound studio, and easier than you'd think.

    The How-To videos were made using Midi Sheet Music, a freeware program that hasn't been updated in years and isn't compatible with Ableton's exported Midi files.  It converted Midi to sheet music, plus could play the sheet music notation with an animated piano keyboard.  And it divided the single-track keyboard into 2-track treble/clef sheet music.  Those were the only things it did, but it did them all-in-one and was dead-simple to use.  It wasn't pretty, but it did the job.
    Now I use Notation Musician to output PDF files of the sheet music.  It also splits the Midi files into two tracks.  Didn't have to have that feature, but it makes the sheet music look cleaner.  I can play the midi files and follow along in the sheet music onscreen, but lacks the animated piano keyboard.
    Lastly, I use Midiano to actually play the song (with the animated keyboard) for the How To video.  It animates the sheet music across the screen, has a gorgeous animated piano at the bottom, and drops played notes visually down the screen to show which keys are coming up in sequence.  Tons of customizing available.  Absolutely free.  Midiano is a sparkling example of brilliant design.  It's a fabulous learning tool, with more features than you can shake a stick at.  Did I mention free?
    I highly recommend Midiano.  Download my midi file (or any Midi file), load it into Midiano, and you can experience a whole new way of learning piano music.  It even waits for you to hit the next notes, before moving on.  You can see it in action in the video above.

    There's more here and there, but these are the basic tools I use.  Music Notation 4 was the last big piece.  With it, I can include the sheet music, and can replicate everything the old Grace Notes blog used to provide.  Since it's been so long between posting the actual 'live' piano video, and then today doing the how to video, I'm putting the new video here on this page.  Going forward, all four elements will be on a single post, so you don't have to search for every separate piece.

    

Music Notation 4 Sheet Music Print Function, and Making PDF Files Work With Google Blogger

     I mentioned in a previous blog the limitations inherent in Google Blogger.  It's great with images, and video, and linking to URLs.  Other files are kind of left hanging out to dry.  There's a workaround on Google Drive Direct Link Generator.  Makes it just a few easy steps.  I'd prefer that Blogger could natively handle the files, but this is almost as easy.

    With that said, the bigger problem has nothing to do with Blogger.  I've been looking for a way to convert MIDI files to Sheet Music.  I play by ear, and haven't read sheet music in about 50 years so writing my own would be more effort than I really want to do.  For years, I used "Midi to Sheet Music", and it was great.  Super simple, but anybody who wanted to learn my arrangements by music notation could do so.  When it quit working, there wasn't much of an alternative out there.  MuseScore had potential, but I didn't like the way it played the files, and it didn't seem to understand my "southern gospel" twang.  Music Notation played my stuff perfectly, but the free version was crippled so as not to print the notation out.  You had to buy the full program to be able to output the sheet music, and it was $90.  

    That's where I've been stuck for the last two months.  My son and his wife unknowingly funded the project when they sent birthday money last week.  Bought and downloaded Music Notation 4, and spent a few days exploring it.  Does more than I need, but the important part is that it DOES WHAT I NEED, and does so extremely well.  It's absolutely worth the cost.  If you click the link, it will take you to Notation Software's website.  If you decide to buy it, be careful to choose the correct program.  They have two, "Notation Composer," and "Notation Musician."
The former is a more complete program, and much more expensive.  The latter, Notation Musician, is the one I got.  For the record, I have no affiliation with Notation Software, and make no money for recommending them.  :^)

    A few weeks ago I posted my first new piano music video in years, and included a link to the midi file (thanks to the Direct Link Generator above).  Now I've got the sheet music for it:

Stepping On The Clouds Free Sheet Music

    I'll edit the original post with the video, so as to have the video, midi, and sheet music all in the same blog post, but wanted to include it here as a technical example of the link working properly, and how well Notation Musician handles the conversion process.  

    As an added bonus, it splits the left and right hands for me.  Not that I'm reading the notes, but watching what's being played while listening to it, it sounds like a fine job of separating the track into two.  Might not be following "The Rules According to Hoyle"... but well enough for someone to learn the song from it.

One more related link - If I choose to make a "How to Play" video like like the original Grace Notes blog did, Music Notation would work but Midiano includes an actual piano keyboard on the screen, so you can read the music and watch the keys all at the same time.  And speed or slow the playback as desired, which makes a great learning tool!!  
    (NOTE:  Today I figured out how to put an image and link on the sidebar, now you can click on the image and go directly to Midiano!)

Google Blogger Housecleaning: Customizing Blogger

    Writing kind of a trivial post today.  At least, it's trivial in the large scheme of things.  It was a big deal for me, anyway.  :^)

    Back in January when the idea of starting Grace Notes back up was gaining momentum, there was a huge speed bump that just about shut things down before it even had a chance to start.  The "cookie consent" situation.  There were a log of changes to manage, new things to learn.  Last time I was paying (a lot!) for hosting and using Wordpress.  This time we're taking the budget express.  Google Blogger is free, and you can have a BUNCH of blogs if you really want to.  Google charges $12 per year for the URL domain, and $12 for Google Office.

    The URL name is a compromise.  It's not the original one for Grace Notes, but it is my overarching URL ever since Galaxy Quest came out.  Crewman6 was the redshirt who lived, and it's always been an inspirational name for me.  Google Office gives me a custom email, more storage for whatever files I use on the blog.  Some other benefits I haven't looked into yet.  Pretty much, this is everything I need to manage Grace Notes.  WordPress was a great blogging platform, and was more versatile than Blogger.  But it was a heck of a lot more expensive to maintain, and the hosting company just kept leapfrogging the rates up every year.  As things stand, I pay about $156 per year for this setup.  The old Grace Notes, with Word Press, hosted on a proper site... was costing nearly $500 per year by the time I pulled the plug.  Blogger is far more cost-efficient for me.

    At some point I'll turn Adsense on, but it's not a big goal here.  Grace Notes cost much more to maintain than it ever made me last time around.  If it can pay the $12 per month fee this time, I'll call it a successful hobby and enjoy it.

    Now we get to today's subject.  To properly manage the cookie consent requirements, I had to paste some code into the Blogger theme.  I also pasted in some custom lines for a couple of features that weren't easily available on Blogger.  Not really a skill of mine, but I did manage to follow a couple of guides.  Afterward, the initial menus for Theme management were gone.  There was a comment about some features not being available now.  I took that to mean I could no longer change the advanced features of my theme, without reloading the base version, making my changes, then re-inserting whatever custom codes needed to be done manually.  For a few months I looked for other theme templates off-Blogger, but didn't find any that seemed worth changing the whole blog for.

     With that in mind, I've been leaving a lot of 'tidying up' undone for months.  Mainly the link colors, and making a custom Banner. Woke up this morning, and it felt like today was the day to finally fix all that.  Found some websites that gave pointers on changing the link colors and sat down to puzzle them out.  The first one wanted me to start off on the Theme tab.  As usual, the first line read "Theme Preview is currently unavailable."

   

    If you're familiar with Blogger, at this point you've probably realized I've been mistaken this whole time.  The ability to customize my theme was always there.  As was the Advanced options.  Maybe something changed, maybe I just read it wrong.  I was clicking the down-arrow on the orange button to get the drop-down menu.  Took me ages to realize I just had to click on the orange button ON THE WORD "Customize!!" in order to get to the customization options. Now that I know, fixing the link colors was very easy.  

    It was a bit of work to get the banner done, but at least it was legitimate work, not a figment of my own imagination.  My previous keyboard was a Yamaha DG-640, and was a grayish-silver color.  That worked really well against the black background of the blog screen.  The Hammer 88 was more difficult.  A black body on a black background doesn't stand out a lot.  I played with it, even tried to use an external image for the background, but it didn't come out perfect.  It will stand for now, I do like it a lot.  But some day in the future, I'd like to have better lighting so the keys will be a clean white. Today's lighting was partly sunlight from a window, partly incandescent bulbs from a ceiling fan light, and the keys aren't consistently white.

    It's been a learning process, and a matter of finding the right software all over the internet.  I started with PixLR, used Irfanview, and tried several online tools before getting something that worked.  At the moment, I'm calling it a day, and an improved banner will have to be a project for another day.

Introducing The Singing Chapmans: Just Over In The Glory Land

 

    Some time ago I digitized all the audio from the record album "Introducing The Singing Chapmans."  The album has 12 songs.  It's one of two albums I know of that has my Uncle Freil playing the piano.  (He also did a couple of CDs solo, but those are easier to find.)  I chose to feature "Just Over In The Glory Land" because it's one of my childhood favorites.  Even better, there's a fair amount of interesting history involved with the song.

    According to TraditionalMusic.com, the words were written by James W. Acuff (1864 – 1937), and the music by Emmett S. Dean (1876 – 1951)

    Per Pixabay, James Acuff wrote it in 1906, so the song is considered Public Domain.

 As always, their midi is clear and pure. Nothing fancy or complicated which makes learning the melody much easier if you’re a ‘play by ear’ pianist.

    I can remember Freil Playing and Aunt Elsie Mae singing this song in church.  And through the years, heard Freil play it just about anywhere there was a piano available.  Eventually it became one of my favorites to play myself, not as nuanced as Freil's playing but brash and bold, and full of joy.  (The result of not knowing as many non-major chords as Freil.)  

    Going back to digitizing the record... it was a loan from my sister, so I had to get the songs to computer quickly and return the album.  It was convenient to do that work immediately, with the intention of going back later and getting them onto Youtube.  So of course they languished forgotten on the computer for a couple of months.  Now they're online.  You can play the video above, and click on "play on YouTube" to see the rest of them.  I may feature a few more from the album, but it will be over time, no rush.

    So far, the songs done by "The Singing Chapmans" have not been easy to research.  It's been difficult to find much about each individual song, and discouraged me from doing each and every one.  In this case, "Glory Land" is well-known, with a bit of history, a bit of lore and some confusion about the song's provenance scattered thoughout the internet.  Here are a few of the links and claims:

    Timeless Truths has a nice looking page, and is one of my favorite resources for information about gospel music. But in this case, they’re a bit sparse on information.  They agree it was writtten by James W. Acuff, and specify that it was PUBLISHED in 1906.  They also state that the copyright is Public Domain. They have the words, sheet music, and a midi file to listen to.

    But the end-all and be-all is an extremely-well researched article by Henrik Smith-Sivertsen. I found out much more than anticipated, and far beyond the scope of southern gospel I usually stick to. Smith-Sivertsen writes that “Just Over In The Glory-Land” was first published in the hymn book “Glad Hosannas: A Winnowed Collection of New and Old Songs for Christian Work and Worship”, in 1906. He gives credit for the lyrics to Acuff, the music to Emmett S. Dean, but goes on to name Dean as the editor of the hymn book, and part owner of the publishing company. The fascinating part, and this explains why some websites seem confused about the copyright, is that another publisher, R. E. Winsett, obtained “renewed copyrights” to the song.

    The article in full is worth digging into, and with an extensive bibliography, seems likely the most authoritative and trustworthy document of the song's history.  

    I personally agree with the articles and websites that list "Glory Land" as a public domain.  Especially after this year, because January 1st, 2023 marks the date for everything published up to the year 1927 (U.S. only; other countries have different laws.) There's a wonderfully detailed article by Jennifer Jenkins regarding copyright.  It's a fantastic read and very worth the time if you're interested in the Public Domain.

    As a matter of fact, she mentions that on January 1, 2024, the first ever appearance of Mickey and Minnie Mouse will enter the public domain!  Imagine that... I bet Disney is having fits about it.  Even Sherlock Holmes no longer has copyright protection.  Until 2023, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's last two Sherlock Holmes stories have been under copyright protection.  As of this year, everything Doyle wrote about Holmes is in the Public Domain. If even the Doyle Estate, and even more so, The Mouse, can't keep their characters out of the public domain, there's no reason a song published in 1906 would still be copyrighted.

It's safe to say, out of all the posts I published in the original Grace Notes, this was by far the easiest yet most overwhelming song to research.  Some day I'll post another blog about "Just Over In The Glory Land", but next time... it'll be with my rendition on piano.  I do believe I mentioned it being one of my favorite songs to play.  :^)

The Technical Side of Grace Notes: Midi and the Missing Sheet Music

     Still celebrating the first brand new posting of my own piano arrangement (Stepping On The Clouds).  Part One of this "Technical Side of Grace Notes" article dealt with how I learn a new song and the process of creating the finished video and blog post.  Today we'll finish with getting the Midi file on Blogger, and acknowledging the missing sheet music.  Then, I'll have a solid reminder against the future and my failing memory.  :^)

    In the previous post, I explained how to save all three elements from Ableton.  The full SET, so I can always re-create the Midi and .wav files.  Just in case.  Plus, of course, the actual Midi and .wav files.  We already applied the .wav file to the video, for a clean audio track with no ambient noise.

    The Midi file I do for it's own sake, for those readers who want it.  Either just to play with Midi on their own setup, or to use Midi as a controllable process for learning how to play my arrangements.  If you downloaded the Midi in order to learn the song, I strongly recommend using Midiano.com as a teaching tool.  It plays my music more "true" than just about anything out there.  It has a visual keyboard you can watch to see the notes as they fall, and the ability to slow down the playback for easier learning.  Plus many other options.

    Not that I have any illusions about my skill level.  There are a ton of musicians on YouTube that put me to shame.  But as my Mom said, there are also plenty of people who are at the perfect level to learn and appreciate what I can offer.  So I don't let all those better players prevent me from putting my two cents in!  

    I'd call my complexity level simple to middling.  There are at least three sites out there that link to my playing as the ideal way to play a specific song.  One of them is even using my sheet music AND my video (it was for Amazing Grace). 
    They were kind enough to give full credit, and to rate the complexity at "Intermediate".  That's higher than I'd expect, and it's very kind of them to share my music.  It validates Mom's advice.

    The real struggle with the Midi wasn't in creating the file, but in getting it onto Blogger in a way that's easy for readers to download.  On the original Grace Notes, I was paying a... large percentage of income... to have a dedicated site to use Wordpress, which I loved.  It had a lot more versatility than Blogger.  But hosting the site got drastically more expensive every single year.  Now I use Google Blogger.  Blogger itself is free.  And a basic Google Workspace is only $12.00 per month.  I still have my custom url, Crewman6.com, and that's a low once-a-year fee.  

    To get to the point, Wordpress offers many options, and you can easily attach just about ANY kind of file for download. Blogger, oddly, only offers Video, Images, or links to other web pages.  Having other filetypes, like Midi, requires a workaround. So here's the gist of it:

    Put the Midi file in your Google Drive, give access to anybody with the link, and copy the link.  Then go to Google Drive Direct Link Generator.  Follow the instructions there to paste your link, then create a direct download link to your Google Drive file.  This is extremely important.  If you try to link to the URL generated by Google Drive, it will open an entirely new webpage, loading it in OVER your blog post.  Then it will attempt to play the midi file in your browser.  Then it will tell you the browser can't play that file, and offer to let you download the file.  THEN you can finally select to download the file.

    That's a huge pain, and the reader winds up on a completely different page, no longer on your post.  Using Google Drive Direct Link Generator is awesome, and free.  It lets you put the modified link on any text or image in your Blogger post, and anybody who clicks the link will be able to simply download the file.  I like choosing where to save downloaded files, so use the "Save As" option.  You might have your downloads default to a single directory for all downloads.  Either is fine.  The point is, the viewer easily downloads the file, without disrupting their reading.  

    Next up, those missing sheet music pages.  On the old Grace Notes blog, I used MidiSheetMusic to both play, and generate sheet music.  It did a great job, but is outdated now and doesn't work with any Midi generated by Ableton.  (Resaving from another Midi player doesn't help either.)  Now I'm in the process of finding another program that can convert Midi to Sheet music, and allow me to make image files of the sheet music.  Originally, those images were saved into .pdf files and uploaded to the blog for anybody that wanted to download.  That's still the plan, but it's been difficult to find software that does exactly what I need.

    I thought I'd solved the problem with MuseScore, which is free to download, converts Midi to sheet music, and allows printing.  Unfortunately, my play-by-ear style seems to confuse Musescore, and when it plays the music back, it completely messes up the order of notes.  Especially if they're played very close together to accentuate the melody.  You know... kind of like a "Grace Note"...  

    Not sure why it struggles with that, because it's sleek and sophisticated software that I like a lot.  Unfortunately, it's not the only one that struggles with my midi.  So far the rule is, if it understands my playing properly, it either offers no sheet music generation, or the function is only available with purchase of the full software.  All the free players that generate printable sheet music have been unable to play the files correctly.

    My favorite, Midiano, plays my stuff perfectly, but as of yet, has no option to create sheet music.  That's not really what Midiano's about, anyway.  My second favorite is a paid software called Notation Musician.  They have a free version, so I KNOW it can play my music perfectly, exactly as intended.  They also generate sheet music.  But the free version does not allow print output.  Yes, I could do screengrabs page by page, but I want to do this the right way.  I'll save up until I can buy the software properly.

    That said, it's $90.00 to purchase, and our budget is very finely balanced to buy food, fuel, pay insurance and taxes.  There's not a lot of leeway for fun things that don't 'earn their keep' monetarily.  So it may take a while to buy Notation Musician.  When I do, I'll go back to any posts as needed and add sheet music downloads.  For now, you're welcome to convert my Midi into sheet music in any way that works for you.  Again, I recommend Midiano.  It's an amazing learning tool, and one of the few players that interprets my playing exactly as intended.

And that's where I'm at, in terms of continuing on Grace Notes.  The last two 'technical' posts were intended to act as memory storage, in case I forget how to do these steps, but I published them just in case any of it might be useful to someone else.  If anybody other than my wife or my mom read these last two posts in their entirety, I'll be totally amazed.  :^D

Southern Gospel on Piano is finally back: Stepping On The Clouds!!

 

Click Here to download Midi File Click Here to download the Sheet Music

If you want to learn to play the song using the Midi file, I recommened using Midiano. It has a ton of customizing and control options to make learning songs easier.

This was a long time in the making. My memory isn't what it used to be, and the hands aren't as steady. After Covid my focus drifts and I wind up forgetting what I'm doing right in the middle of a song. Took 3 months of practicing before even trying to record it... and 3 days to finally get one good enough to keep! Hours the first two days. On the third day lightning struck and it only took two tries.

    This is a song Uncle Freil used to play as a special for Aunt Elsie Mae to sing. Not sure how many friends and family will remember this one. The only place I ever heard it was when we were going to Grace Baptist Church in Nahunta. I'd completely forgotten this song until a few months ago when some random playing one evening resulted in this song. Had to mull it over for a bit to remember the song title.

    Stepping On The Clouds was written by Linda Stalls. I didn't have much luck learning anything about her or her music until, sadly, disovering her obituary from May, 2021. In 1975 she was nominated for a Dove award for her song, Stepping On The Clouds. It's sad that this, so far, is the most I've been able to find out about her.

    It's easier to find information on The Hoppers, the first gospel family to sing the song. I found that on the blog, TheScottSpot. You can search the Hoppers on Youtube and find a lot of videos featuring them. I appreciate their style. Southern Gospel family groups comprise the majority of my favorite music. Mostly for the happy, toe-tapping gospel music, but catch me in the right mood you'll find me playing slow, soulful songs of yearning and hope.

    This is also something of a personal revival for me. Grace Notes was my blog for about ten years. Life in general got in the way, and I gave it up a couple of years ago. When I decided to recreate it, all my blog posts were lost. Still had all the Youtube videos, so as time passes I'll re-write posts for the songs. I've also been documenting the entire recreation process.

    All along it's been in my mind to record new songs, old favorites, especially ones that Uncle Freil used to play. This inspired a hunt through our two-floor shed, for any audiotapes, video, or CD's of Freil that may have been left in storage over the years. It's been a mostly successful search. Found a lot of his music I'd forgotten, things I haven't heard in decades. One specific video is still missing. Running out of places to look, but still hoping.

    And, in these last few months, I've been working on this arrangement. It's all by ear. Not very good at reading sheet music. It's been a struggle to build enough muscle memory to get through the whole song when my focus wavers. And it's been tough getting to the point where it was good enough to record. The result isn't perfect, but it's close and I'm very happy with it. (And very ready to move on to a new song...)

I truly hope you like it!

The Singing Chapmans: Something I Can Feel, & One Day I Will

    "Something I Can Feel" is the fourth song on side one of The Singing Chapmans "Redeemed By The Crucified One" album.  The song was written by Elmer Cole. For lyrics, click HERE.

    I've tried learning about Elmer Cole's life, and what else he wrote, but nearly every mention I can find is in reference to an article about someone else.  If you can point me to any website or article that has authoritative information, please leave the link in a comment.  It's hard to believe how little there is, when he's written songs like "I Found The Answer", I'm Looking for Jesus, and the fantastic "Ten Thousand Years." (This info, and a little bit more, were on the blog Southern Gospel Tidbits.)

    I found multiple mentions of him being with Willie Wynn and the Tennesseans, but again, his name was included, but no further information.  I'm not so familiar the most of the songs I can find for him, but have heard "Ten Thousand Years" all my life.  It was one of the songs Aunt Elsie Mae sang (and Uncle Freil played) as a special in church.

    "One Day I Will" is the fifth song on "Redeemed By The Crucified One."  It was composed by Walt Mills and John Stallings, or perhaps written by John Stallings, and performed by Walt Mills.  What little I could find seemed unclear, none of it from an authoritative source.  The lyrics can be found on Bluegrass Lyrics.com.

    Again, there's not much available other than their names being included/listed on a large number of websites.  Certainly no life stories, inspirations, or quotes.  There are some Youtube videos if you search, but again, nothing I'd consider a reliable source.  This is starting to look like a trend.  I'm not sure if it's more modern gospel, less-known gospel, or if the nature of online information has changed.  

    Over ten years ago, it seemed there was never a shortage of information about gospel composers and musicians.  This blog, "Grace Notes", is a recreation of a blog I kept from around 2012-2022.  Actual life got in the way, the site languished, and eventually I let it go.  This is a recreation of the spirit of that blog.  Years ago, there were Wikis, active forums, personal accounts, historical sites, all kinds of sources to help paint a picture of the songwriters that influenced my childhood.  Now, it's a desert.  Maybe I'm just not using the best search terms.  

    Whatever the case is, I'll leave you with these two songs for now.  For future posts, if I can't find enough information about the writers, or the song, I'll just give whatever brief details there are, and include multiple songs per blog.  No sense filling up all my pages with "I don't know, and can't find out."

It's been a busy week at work, to the point several friends from other offices are chipping in and helping to get the work done.  Tomorrow's Friday.  I'm off to see my parents on Saturday.  Something to look forward to.  I can't wait!

Midiano: Free Interactive Piano-App in your Browser!

     Yesterday I posted a little bit about the search for a "Midi Sheet Music" replacer.  Today, I want to go into more detail about the results of my search.  MuseScore 4, is my new favorite for printing out sheet music.  It's one narrow band of my search for a full-featured replacement.

    The real gem was in stumbling across midiano.com.  The homepage gives you two options; you can click "Start", and jump right into things, or click "About", and get an overview of the project in general.   This is the ONLY viable replacement for Midi Sheet Music (MSM).  There's nothing out there, at least not for free, that comes even close.  But where MSM is dated, hasn't been updated in years, and is no longer capable of loading all my MIDI files... Midiano goes the distance, and it does so with style.

To quote from the website:

• Midiano is an interactive Piano-learning app that runs on any device with a modern browser.
• Open any MIDI-File and Midiano shows you the notes as falling bars over a piano as well as the corresponding sheet music.
• Connect a MIDI-Keyboard to get instant feedback if you hit the correct notes.
• You can also use the keyboard as output device to play the MIDI-Files on your keyboard.

    It runs on any browser (and device) that supports the WebAudioAPI (Full support apart from Internet Explorer).

To connect a MIDI-Keyboard the browser also needs to support the WebMIDIAPI (Currently only Chrome and Edge).

    Midiano played my songs correctly.  More accurately, it played them the way I play them.  I'm not a trained pianist.  I'm a guy who plays by ear, is middling-good, and loves southern gospel style.  

    The song I play goes into Ableton in a single non-stop recording, while recording video at the same time.  If I mess up, I start over.  Once it's good enough, the audio and midi are output with no editing.  Then the audio is synchronized over the video, and the video's original audio is deleted.  The result is a nice video of me playing the song, minus the dogs barking, doorbells ringing, voices, neighborhood traffic...  

I'M A MIDIOT

    The MIDI file I create doesn't have a treble and base.  No separation for which hand plays which notes.  I don't read sheet music myself, and certainly can't write my own notation.  Midi Sheet Music used to be my go to for converting the midi files into notation that plays across the screen with the midi file.  Having found Midiano, I'll be using it from now on.  This is where it all comes together for people who want to learn to play my arrangements.  I record a video as the midi file is playing, slow once, then full speed.  It shows the notation, and the piano keys, as they play across the screen.  

    To make it more helpful, I include the midi files, plus a .pdf of the sheet music, on this blog.  All free.  

And all thanks to Midiano for making it possible again.  And for everybody who downloads my midi files, they can use Midiano to make learning the arrangements even easier.  You can easily slow down or speed up the playback. Pause, try a segment, back up and try again...  Midiano's far better than just watching a "how to" video, and I play to include a link to Midiano on every page that has a downloadable Midi file.

    Some day I'll see about using Adsense.  Maintaining this blog, a custom URL, and Google Office, costs about $12.95 a month.  If at some point my blog can become self-supporting, that would be the cat's pajamas.  Until then, at least it's affordable.  (You should have seen my BlueHost fees...)

I THOUGHT MY ORIGINAL SITE WAS GONE FOREVER

    Grace Notes, my original site, was online for over a decade.  I couldn't learn new songs fast enough to make it a profitable business, but occasionally someone treated me to a cup of coffee.  Sometimes even a banana split.  But the hosting fees were ridiculous, hundreds of dollars a year, for a site that never paid for itself.  So I gave it up.  We couldn't afford that kind of money just for fun.  

    

    Could have sworn I backed it up first, but mistakes were made...  and I thought it was gone forever.  Until recently when Monique found a mostly complete mirror of my site on "Wayback Machine."  Now I have access to many of the pages that were gone.

    I'm backing all the pages up that they saved.  Not everything was there, but a lot.  They saved nearly 100 pages of the original Grace Notes.  Now I've restarted Grace Notes in this new venue.  Writing new things, working on new music, but also plan to recreate every missing page I can.  Eventually all the midi files and sheet music will once again be available, for free download.

MIDIANO - ELEGANT, BRILLIANT, AND FREE

    Getting back to the point, there's a lot of 'step by step' processes needed to make this vision work.  Midiano is a HUGE step toward rebuilding my dream.  It's going to take years, but I see the path ahead now, and it's getting clearer ever day.

    To make it even better, it's available as a Progressive Web App!  I didn't know what that was, or how to set it up so I sent an email to the guy who wrote Midiano (He doesn't have his name on his website; for the sake of privacy, I won't use it here, either).  Within 24 hours, he sent a very nice email, with a link to instructions for my specific browser (I use Vivaldi).  And some general information to help me understand.  And an offer to help more, if that wasn't enough.  How neat is that?  

    

The instructions were beautifully simple.  Three easy steps and now I can work on Midiano any time, online or offline.  I'm immensely grateful!!

If you're looking for a learning tool that plays any MIDI file, creates sheet music notation, shows a piano keyboard, and shows them both in real-time, playing as the midi file is playing... you can't do any better than Midiano.  Go check out his site.  There's nothing to buy.  It's just a really cool utility, written by one of the nicest geniuses I've ever met.  :^)

Grace Notes - Restoring A Lost Website

 So far, these updates have been more 'talk' than 'update'.  I write them for people to read if they want, but mainly to help me not lose the memories.  Eventually I'll start building the "real" pages, with the music.  For now,  just documenting the process so the memory won't be lost.  Between getting older, and losing a great deal of cognition and memory from Covid, forgetting everything important is a huge fear of mine.  So this is something of a journal for me, as well as a record of progress on the blog.

Even back in 2011, when "Grace Notes" was still just wishful thinking, one of it's main purposes was to exercise my memory.  Playing an instrument, learning new songs to play, are supposed to be good for memory.  Making a blog about it felt like a natural extension of the plan.  

After about 10 years, I let the project drop.  It was taking drastically more effort and more time, to learn new songs and arrangements.  Meanwhile, the hosting cost kept shamelessly rising year by year, until I got discouraged and quit.  Eventually funding the hosting company became money I couldn't afford to spend, on a project that never really earned it's keep.  The backup copy made before shutting the site down... disappeared.  The website was gone, all the research and writing was gone.  Recreating the site without the writing, or even my notes, felt like too much of a time sink.

In the middle of all that, my digital grand, the Yamaha DG-640, bit the dust.  Not all at once, but key by key, until it was unusable.  Talked to a repair tech, who told me that the control boards on Yamaha digital grands went brittle after a few years.  Repairs are pointless, because they won't stay repaired.  He convinced me it was cheaper to replace the keyboard.  That's still a lot of money, and it took a while, but now I'm using an M-Audio Hammer 88.  Not really a digital piano, it's more accurately a Midi controller.  It came with Ableton Live 10 Lite.

There were a lot of road blocks along the way, but everything is finally converging.  It took, among other things, getting a dedicated laptop computer to run Ableton.  It also took a lot of time learning a bare minimum to use Ableton.  It was too much complexity for my needs.  Finally everything is working right, and I know exactly how to get my playing from keyboard to Youtube.

Additionally, Monique recently discovered a partial backup of Grace Notes, on the Wayback Machine. It's not complete, but at least I have access to a huge amount of the original site.  I'm nearly done backing all of those pages up onto a hard drive.  Once that's done, there's only one major hurdle left... Adsense.

As best I can tell, my Adsense account is still active.  I'd like to eventually use it on this blog, but google hates plagiarism.  Even when I'm re-creating my own website, with my own original writing.  There doesn't seem to be a sure-fire safe way to put my old pages on this new blog, without being penalized.  The only option is to re-write everything, with enough changes to count as completely original work.

(Update) - After writing around 40 original posts, I applied to Adsense for this site, but was declined.  They wanted me to make drastic and time-consuming changes to the site, for a better chance of being approved.  I like my site the way it is, so there won't be any Adsense on Grace Notes this time around.

At least now, I have much of the original text.  Still time-consuming but better than re-writing it blindly, not knowing if it's different enough.  When I've backed up all the pages that WayBack archived, I'll start bringing back the old(new) pages.

Additionally, I'd like to create and record new arrangements, moving forward with brand new content.  That's the part I'm excited about.  Having fewer "progress reports", and more focus on real content.  Fingers crossed, it won't be long now!!