[HANASHIR:10248] New Music and Home Recording

[Ethan Leigh Bueno de Mesquita <mesquita...>]

Hi all,

I am writing for a couple of reasons. The first is because a bunch of
people from this list have been to my website to download some of my
music but I don't have the email address of everyone who has contacted me,
so I thought I'd let people who are interested know that there are two new
songs recorded and up on the site with lyric and chord sheets. They are
my L'cha Dodi and V'erastich Li (which I wrote for my wedding). The url is

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~mesquita/music.html

The site now has six of my songs on it as well as the only recordings of
the chanting of the Sheva B'rachot available on the web (as far as I know,
there is one other site with them but it doesn't work).

But, to return to an old theme of mine that I seem to bring up whenever I
put new songs up on my web site I wanted to talk a little more about home
recording of Jewish music. The cost of producing an album is so high and
there are many Jewish composers out there who don't necessarily want to
spend that kind of money but would love to distribute their songs so that
people can use them at camps, synagogues, schools etc. I think the web
creates an amazing opportunity to make this happen. For an investment of a
few hundred dollars you can get a four-track that will allow you to
make decent recordings of songs (they don't sound at all professional, but
you can communicate the idea of the song). And then it is free to
distribute them on the web as MP3s. I know I have said this before, but I
want to keep encouraging people to do it. I have had a lot of fun making
recordings and have received emails from a lot of people who have been to
my site and are using some of my songs, which is very gratifying. There
are so many good songs being written and most of us only end up with
access to the tiny percentage that are either composed by someone in our
area or end up on an album that gets good distribution. It seems like a
shame.

Ok end of rant. I'm off to try to get some work done (I don't recommend
starting a recording project while trying to get a dissertation finished,
it is quite the procrastination tool).


best,

Ethan

*******************************
Ethan Bueno de Mesquita
Ph.D. Candidate

mesquita (at) fas(dot)harvard(dot)edu
www.fas.harvard.edu/~mesquita

Department of Government
Littauer Center, North Yard
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA  02138
(617) 384-7303 (office)

"Can lack of bias ever compensate for absence of insight?"
        -Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel


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