The Gathering

I think it worked very well indeed. The community piece, "Dirty Old Town" was fantastic: everyone in the hall either singing or playing, complete with extra sound effects (cats meiowing, sirens blowing, smoky wind howling, etc). Even the last line went perfectly - well done everyone involved.

As for the massed ranks of The Gathering Ensemble - frankly, we were the best act of the night. Modesty aside, I think there might be a world tour and an album deal out of it. We nearly went disastrously wrong when one over-zealous player forgot to repeat the A-part during the mandolin section, and the poor green mandoleers didn't know what to do. We recovered, though, with a little help from my cracked vocals and manic encouraging smiles. The bagpipe solo was a triumph. Now pat yourselves on the back.

My recording of it can be found here ...

http://www.iwilson.co.uk/music/SMGConcert2010/

Thankfully you cant hear by poor singing

Ian

PS. For those technically minded, this was recorded as a .wav on a Zoom H2, then edited in Audacity and exported as a 128k mp3. Editing consisted of -12dB normalize effect on the applause at the end, then -1dB normalize on everything, then a high pass filter with 100Hz cut-off. I'd be interested to know if there is a better way of editing this sort of thing. The .wav (70Mb) is in the above link if anyone wants to try.

That's fantastic, Ian. It can't capture the total success we had on the night, but for anyone who was there it should raise a huge smile.