Skip to main content

Classical Music Ensembles

Although many of the arrangements published on our site are based on works originally composed for keyboards we have increasingly tackled works for classical music ensembles. These involve more complex decisions about how to group the different instruments and what to replace them with. It has been very encouraging, however, to find that the steel drum band often does an excellent job replacing the strings while the synthesized ocarina can extend itself across the whole wind section.

We have published a short account of our approach to tackling classical music ensembles with examples of the different percussion ensembles we have used. As ever any thoughts or comments would be most welcome.

August was a busy month for us - making lots of changes to the site - some of them have been very effective and others have had hardly any impact so far. So it is quite interesting to see, in these first few days of September, that spiders interested in the robot.txt file seem to at least equal human visitors to the site as a whole and out number them heavily for this blog. So I hope these spiders are musically minded even if their primitive vibration receptors (eight eyes and legs but no ears) miss the finer points of our arrangements.

Popular posts from this blog

Worldwide audience

In the last month Download2MP3 was reached from 169 countries with the remaining gaps being a few countries in North Africa. These days most visits are going direct to one of the big name composer pages although the ragtime category is holding it's own. The last twelve months or so have been a dry patch interms of producing more recordings but I'm pleased to report that the technical issues which been related to various software upgrades. I have been using Cubase for at least 25 years not on an Atari but an Acorn with an external roaland Sound Canvas synthesiser which was purchased in London's Tin Pan Alley. Some of the steps that have got us to 10.5 have been very disconcerting but the truth is that there is nothing to campare with it for the work that I do. I have also acquired some exciting new instruments in the last few months to augment the stalwarts which saw this site get underway. So the Covid19 Lockdown is giving me the time to produce more recordings wh...
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. 

Downloads a plenty

Hadn't really looked at the download stats in the new suite except to see what was managing to get into the top ten alongside Beethoven. So far this May we have had nearly 41000 complete downloads and 55000 incomplete downloads. As you'd expect the incompletes are concentrated in the popular long pieces like Beethoven symphony movements. For some reason (probably alphabetic do you think) Scott joplin's Weeping Willow was the least popular along with 50 others on just one complete download out of the 800different MP3 files downloaded. Perhaps more analysis later.