Monthly Archives: February 2010

Horace Weston’s SF Jig

In this awesome gurdonark travelogue video using Horace Weston’s Old Time Jig for the soundtrack, I especially like the canned Windows Movie Maker transitions from cut to cut. Very 2010.

Today I finished my meetings in time to catch the BART back to SFO and my hotel. I was able to hike on the San Francisco Bay trail in Burlingame. The trail featured American redhead and mallard ducks, coots, seagulls, gray clouds, passing planes, cute dogs being walked, and ice plant flowers, bumblebees, waves on rocks, and distant foggy hills.

I took a lot of pictures. I also took a lot of video with a special camera–a little Chinese 4 megapixel camera I got on eBay for 25 dollars [a sunplus], whose light sensor gives an ethereal effect that Mr. Holga, whomever he may be, would envy.

I brought the video to my room at the Crowne Plaza, downloaded Windows Movie Maker 2.6 into Windows 7 ( which, does not come with the best MS program). I’ve long been a huge fan of your jig, and

made it the soundtrack to “Impressions: San Francisco”. It’s a kind of lo-fi sense of my afternoon:

how tater bug mandolins got their name

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The Potato Museum on potato beetles:

In the 1870s the presence of the beetle was so much a part of the Eastern scene that for a brief time ladies black and yellow-striped evening capes were the fashion. And a joke of the period had potato beetles studying mailing lists of seed companies to find out who had ordered seed potatoes.

homestyle mandolin sample pack

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I have put together a sample pack of rootsy solo mandolin, a “matched set” to be used in different places in a long form podcast, radio show, or video. The set contains segments from a second or two up to about a minute, to be used for cues, hits, bumps, interstitials and voiceovers.

The chunks are in a variety of lengths – 2 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, and 45 seconds – to fit different functional requirements in a radio show or video. The longest segments are for a credit sequence or show opener. The 15 and 30 second segments are for voiceover ads. The 1-2 second bits are for marking the beginning or end of a story or scene.

I was thinking of the way the bass worked in Barney Miller. It was a key part of the theme song, and contributed little riffs at the beginning or end of a scene. Every one of these short bits here is a separate take with its own beginning, middle and end, not a clip from a larger work.

The instrument is my old Fairbanks mandolin. The feel is uptempo, excitable, peppy, perky, traditional, natural, organic, old time, americana. Time signature = 4/4, key = G blues .

This is an experiment, so I’d be grateful for feedback on what worked and what didn’t. How is the sound quality? Are there lengths of cue that you needed that weren’t here? I’m happy to do custom recordings to fill in the gaps. Just ask.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License. If you need a different license feel free to ask.