Elizabethan Serenade | Woovebox

You probably know this tune but can't quite put your finger on it. It was composed by Ronald Binge in 1951 as an instrumental for the Mantovani orchestra and became widely used on radio and TV in the 1950s and 60s. It also spawned a hideous pop version with lyrics as well as a much better reggae version. I've synthesised it on the amazing Woovebox. About time there was an electronic version out there.
Bonus fact: Ronald Binge is also responsible for the theme tune of Radio 4's Shipping Forecast.
The tune's time signature is 3/4. Most electronic music gadgets tend to 4/4. I wanted to see if I could make the Woovebox waltz. I was easily able to set pattern lengths to 12 (away from the default 16), but when combining fragments for the final song, each so called bar is still exactly 16 steps, or 1 and a third bars. This lead to some weird fragment arithmetic to get it to play.
How come there's no sound output lead in shot? Well, sadly my unit's headphone jack developed a fault whilst I was working on it. Instead I dumped the song as a .wav file (a Woovebox trick) and merged it to the video. For reasons unknown to me, the wav wouldn't play in iMovie, so I then had to convert to m4a format but now it's a bit distorted. What you see is the Woovebox miming along to its own performance, Top of the Pops style. This also explains why the song fades out. I was working on the middle section when the fault occured, hence the unfinished feel.

[@antoinehinge1846]

Very fun ! Thanks for the tech description, I like this little insight on your music journey.

[@majesticsquid5643]

Do you have a Spotify page? I really love your covers, it would be awesome to be able to add them to my playlists 💛
Keep up the amazing work!

[@richselby7878]

I'm afraid I don't. Clearing the rights with the publisher is a hurdle.

[@ewanyork]

Ah, fantastic! (I think I noticed this a little late… maybe I should actually break my universal rule and actually click on the notification bell…)
I didn’t recognise the tune at all but am going to seek it out. It works really well as an electronic thing, especially with the way you’ve chosen/designed such 70s-sounding patches! One of the main lead ones, with (what sounds like?) a filter envelope on every note, sounded 100% 70s-TV-theme to me - absolutely brilliant.
I’m glad to see you’ve mastered the bizarre-fragment-length trick to get different timings, although I sympathise that you had to 😃
(And all of mine are .WAV exports as well - usually I just leave the wire connected to a speaker to trigger some sound-sensitive lights or something, and edit the WAV file in separately. Incidentally I have only ever found one (Mac) program that can interpret the exported WAV, which is Fission by Rogue Amoeba. I have to re-export from there to get a file usable in anything else. No idea why but I hope for a fix sometime.)
There’s something brilliantly jaunty but understated about your arrangements - they’re always filled with interesting sounds and great arrangement choices, at the same time as being really delicately balanced and not overly in-your-face. In short, they sound like actual musical pieces rather than novelty performances. Fantastic.

[@richselby7878]

Thanks for the kind words - and paying attention. Good to know the Mac/wav struggle is real. Must check out that Fission thing. I just uploaded to a random cloud converter. Your recordings sound fine, so it must be a better quality conversation. May I ask, what format do you convert to?

[@ewanyork]

@@richselby7878 Usually 44.1kHZ 16-bit stereo WAV. At first I deliberately chose a different format just to be certain the software was actually rewriting it, but that ended up not being necessary. In Fission at least, as long as you press Export, it rewrites/rebuilds even if you choose the same format you're already in. It's a very simple program but surprisingly often more handy than my full-featured DAW - recommended!