[PlanetCCRMA] Off topic: XMAS gift idea

[Timo Sivula]

Hi,

last year I recorded a 10 song CD with my 5 year old daughter for
christmas and gave it as a christmas gift to relatives. This turned out
to be a superhit, they still talk about the record when we visit them.
The value of a home made christmas CD is entirely on a different
planet ;-) than some towels or chocolate. I thought I would remind you
of this opportunity as some kind of payback for all the fun Planet CCRMA
has given me. And as a bonus, it is a very affordable christmas gift in
these tough economic times.

As the audience are no audiophiles, the amount of work needed is
minimal. We chose songs that they had been practising at my daughter's
school for their christmas event. This way the need for rehearsing was
minimal. Google found MIDI files for most of the songs, and for those
that it did not, I played the backround using an acoustic guitar. Most
of the time went to finetuning the MIDIs by selecting better soundfonts.
Once that was done recording of ten songs was done in two evenings.
Mastering was mainly a level setting procedure, as I had used no eq and
only a minimal amount of reverb on the vocals. We made a CD sleeve using
a piece of software we found on the net and put a picture of my daughter
singning on the backside and a picture she drawed on the front. This
gave also some nice time with the kids when we were gluing the sleeves
together. 

Christmas midis: http://www.lockergnome.com/midi/

br. Timo
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/pipermail/planetccrma/attachments/20081205/672b570d/attachment.html