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I finished this at 23:48, but didn't manage to get it uploaded before midnight. Still, fitting that it's going up right around midnight of Samhain, I guess, even if I didn't manage to finish it before sunset.
This is a first draft, rushed online because I wanted to hit this calendar target. I'll do a little cleanup over the next few days. In particular, I'll be tweaking the rythym of the drone part to make it easier to play, trying to figure out whether what sounds like a mistake in the MIDI file is an odd artifact or a typo I didn't catch scanning the pages, and trying to decide whether the ending needs some kind of flourish or dressing-up. Oh, and taking suggestions for how to make it more readable. Um, and listening to a Heather Alexander tune that one section started reminding me of, to make sure I didn't accidentally rip her off.
On the one hand, a bunch of ideas that sounded pretty cool when I played them on the bass didn't make it into here, either because I decided they didn't really flow from another section I was keeping, or because they didn't stay in my head long enough to get written down (I hate it when that happens). On the other hand, it came out two or three times as long as I thought it was going to be when I started it, and I worried that I was going off on tangents until I played back the MIDI to hear how it all hangs together (without having half my brain thinking about playing it).
I'll try to get around to putting the ABC file online somewhere in the next day or so. I'm trying to upload the MIDI file now (though I'm guessing most computer MIDI players won't make a sound like an electric bass played that high -- Windows Media Player sounds more like a piano than a bass when it gets way up there; an actual bass guitar gets a really interesting tone past about the fourteenth fret and beyond.). At the moment I'm having odd problems with ftp.
Oh, and the slide section is because the notes there go off the end of the fretboard (even if you have a 24-fret neck, which I don't). Someone with a 5-string bass might get away with transposing the whole tune down a string instead ...
There's another piece I've been working on a lot longer that's not finished yet, which will be be called simply "Samhain". That has (so far) turned into a guitar/bass/drums thing and morphed in other ways as I've added to it. So far, it seems like it would follow this tune nicely (which is why I gave this one this title) -- let's see whether that's still true by the time I finish it!
Happy Samhain!
accomplished