Here is a performance I recorded last August of my Jean Guillou influenced piece, The White Flame. I am using my trusty Roland GR55 which is the same unit I have used extensively with Karl Hyde and the rock opera, Pop’pea.
Jean Guillou’s magnificent flames of hair and the inspiration for the title of my piece!
I was interested to see how writing a piece of music within a particular large room would affect my note choices and phrasing. The hall I used in this example is the Upper Room at Cairns Road Baptist Church and I’d like to thank them for the opportunity. The room has a long decay, around the 2.5 second range so therefore lots of long legato notes would work best in that setting. I also wanted to try and use tones that would resonate well within that space so I created a trombone woodwind hybrid using the dual PCM layers of the GR55. I mapped the trombone sounds to the expression pedal which let me create swells over the woodwind base. The GR55 has an incredibly deep programability which I think people aren’t aware of. I have to say though that editing on the unit is no fun and I highly recommend Gumtown’s astonishingly excellent free editor for it available here.
The GR55 editor for PC and OSX
Gaz Williams 