recordings3 of my reconstructions (dapu) from:
Tang and Song dynasty (including You Lan)
Shen Qi Mi Pu (1425)
Zheyin Shizi Qinpu (<1491)
Fengxuan Xuanpin (1539)
Xilutang Qintong (1549)
都是個人彈我打譜的琴曲。3
I. 唐、宋代出版的 (包括‘幽蘭’)
II. 神奇秘譜錄音
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T of C
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請聽絲弦古琴
Listen to the Fisherman's Song |
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The .mp3 sound files linked below2 have my
recordings3 of my reconstructions (dapu) from: Tang and Song dynasty (including You Lan) Shen Qi Mi Pu (1425) Zheyin Shizi Qinpu (<1491) Fengxuan Xuanpin (1539) Xilutang Qintong (1549) |
下面鏈接的七十多.MP3文件2
都是個人彈我打譜的琴曲。3 I. 唐、宋代出版的 (包括‘幽蘭’) II. 神奇秘譜錄音 |
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VI. 發明琴譜 Faming Qinpu (1530)
1.
Important note on the natural volume of qin music
For the most authentic listening experience, the speaker volume should be kept low, e.g., no louder than normal speech level. Qin music is not designed to overcome its natural surroundings. Note, however, that an essential element of qin music is the color of the tones; the .mp3 file format required here necessarily means some of this color has been lost.
(Return)
2. As you listen a new window should open up with an image showing the recording progressing; depending on the program, it may also indicate the time elapsed. If this window is not already a small size you should be able to format it to make it so. Then, by putting this window on top of the page introducing the melody, you should be able to read the introduction as you listen; and for many of the pieces you should be able follow the music section by section by scrolling down to the section titles, where timings are indicated.
Also, you may have settings that control whether a selected piece plays only once or repeats continuously.
For all the music I play I have also written out Western staff notation using the compuer program Encore. For those transcriptions that are online along with the recordings, please note that the transcriptions use Western staff notation as though they are the Chinese number notation. In other words, C is not the modern C or the baroque C, but the relative note do, corresponding to the Chinese gong or 1. This is because there is no absolute pitch with the qin: the actual pitch of the strings depends on such variables as the size of the qin, the quality of the strings and the temperature, as well as the taste of the player. There are further comments on this under Modality in Early Ming QinTablature. (Return)
3.
Online recordings (MP3; see also General and Technical Details of my Qin Recordings. )
The selections from my CDs were originally recorded during the late 1990s in the 招隱室 Studio for Seeking Solitude, a room at my home overlooking the South China Sea in Cheung Chau, Hong Kong, then were edited in a professional studio. I had to record in the middle of the night, at which time the main obstacle was the noise of the motors in passing fishing junks.
The other recordings included here are being made beginning in October 2006 in the new Studio for Seeking Solitude at my home near the Hudson River in New Jersey, facing Manhattan; at present, only primitive editing is possible. The room is rather quiet, but if you listen carefully with headphones you may sometimes hear way in the background the sound of passing cars, planes or helicopters. If it is a neighboring lawn care machine I have to stop.
The equipment I use is basically the same as for the previous recordings, except that I now have a Sony RCD-W500C CD recorder. This allows me to make the MP3 files by first copying my DAT recordings onto a CD, then ripping MP3 files from there onto my computer. (My Sony DAT recorder records at a sample rate of 48, whereas CDs use a sample rate of 44.1. For this reason, although both the DAT and the CD are digital signals, I can only copy between the two using analog format.)
Regarding the melodies with lyrics, for those with the shorter lyrics I simply sing as I play. However, there are also here some songs that are too long or complicated for me to sing and play well at the same time (three are online at present: Ming De Yin / Kongsheng Jing, Qing Jing Jing, and the sung version of Jiu Kuang). For these I first record the qin onto the DAT recorder. Then I then play this back, listening on headphones as the sound is also fed through a Samson S-Mix, a small five-channel mixer. I then sing along through the original microphones, also hooking them up through the AERCO microphone preamp to the Samson. This mixed sound then goes to the CD recorder. I sing at the same distance from the microphone (about 1 meter) as I do when playing qin and singing at the same time, but at present the balance does not seem to me quite correct.
Getting this balance right is a problem I am still working on, but in the mean time I am going ahead and putting some of these files online for two reasons. One is that some people have expressed particular interest in qin songs, but there are very few recordings currently available. The other is my hope that enough of the beauty of these melodies will shine through my amateur singing and recording that it encourages other people to sing the songs themselves. (Return)
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