Skip to main content

Ragtime on Steel Drums Launched

Today the long anticipated launch of Ragtime on steel drums has arrived.

A Scot Joplin page with 30 of his works arranged on several combinations and permutations of steel drums with marimba, vibraphone, harp and selected synthesizers has just been added to our site.

This collection is made up of Rags (including the Maple Leaf Rag which was the first one to be published and is today's streaming sample) Dances, Marches and Entertainments or Novelties including the Entertainer and Easy Winners which were featured in 'The Sting' movie. You can trace the developments of syncopation recorded here into the beginnings of Jazz especially in the work of people like Jelly Roll Morton. It is a fascinating step along the path that led to the development of today's popular music.

This is our first departure from European classical music although Scott Joplin was strongly influenced by his classical music education and in his turn influenced European composers such as Debussy and Satie.

These pieces were a joy to arrange - they have been refreshed by our percussion treatment - why not give them a hearing.

Popular posts from this blog

Adding to the collection or ...

There are more opportunities to add to this collection but we think that it is now time to make some additional payment options available. For low cost items, credit card transactions are rather expensive so we will need to trade the benefits to us of larger orders against a premium for individual track purchases. This means adding shopping cart facilities along side the simple BitPass functionality and is going to be a bit of a programming challenge. More of this anon - in the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - first movement of No3 from Johann Sebastian Bach himself and our arrangement on steel drums and marimba - full HiFi track only 0.99$(US).
Read more
Persistance does it It is now 15 years since this website was launched. In that time we have had ups and downs - some associated with Google algorithm changes but this year we seem to have seen steady growth in visits and some dramatic download volumes. It looks as if we might reach 1000 giga bytes of download this month for the first time ever.  Our global reach is wider - although Indonesia and India still account for over 25% of visits we had visits from 126 countries in the last week exceptions include Uragauy and some sub sahara countries. The bulk come through organic Google searches with the next largest share coming from our daily tweets. 
Read more

Shop Re-opens

The PHP upgrade on my server precipitated closure of the shop for a couple of weeks but I finally found the time to work through the backlog of OS Commerce upgrades that I had been putting off and Lo and Behold the shop is working again. I still need to do a bit of testing on the shopping cart arithmetic and make sure that the downloading is still working properly after the changes I have made. I'll also have a look at the recent contributions to see if there are any other improvements I should be making. In the mean time there has been another surge of Ranking changes on Google as reported on Rankpulse and it is evident that our rankings continue to swing around on a daily basis but our overall position and visitor numbers seem pretty stable - even the shop closure didn't seem to have much of an impact.
Read more