I had a digital recording made of our 2015 concert at Pinafore Park. The microphone was situated a fair
bit behind the audience, well back of the concrete. I find it impressive that the sound carried so well
and was picked up by the recorder at such a distance. The recording as a whole is rather noisy, with a
lot of ambient sound and a fair bit of wind; a couple of tracks are unrecoverable because of the noise
of the wind. For this reason, Grieg's Hjertesår and the Superman March will not be
available.
You can listen to the files in place on the website by using the audio controls below, or you can
download the mp3 files by right-clicking (or CTRL-clicking for Macs) and choosing "Save Audio As..."
(Safari users will see "Download Audio As..." instead. Web standards never seem to be so standard after
all.) I expect to be able host these files "forever" but you just never know. Always keep backups of
digital media! I suggest you download anything you'd like to keep.
Hogan's Heroes March
adapted from the Hal Leonard Arrangement
Our opener. This performance is a from an adaptation of the Hal Leonard marching band
arrangement which features several short breaks for drum solos. The Sliders don't
have any drums, so I filled the spaces with bugle calls.
When the Saints Go Marching In
arr. ???
I was actually able to get rid of the worst of the clipping from the wind, so the
audio quality is not too bad, although there is a lot of birdsong in the background.
We normally play a more traditional Dixieland version of Saints but this year
we tried something a little different.
Raiders March
John Williams; arr. John Helm
The arrangement we had in our library called this piece the Indiana Jones March but
I think that Raiders March is a more correct title—at least, that is how it is
identified on the Raiders of the Lost Ark sound track album. We have more effective
arrangements of this march in our library, but this is what we had to work with at the time.
Ville du Havre
arr. Dr. Michael McDonough
McDonough's setting of the hymn When Peace Like a River, now apparently scored for
trombone choir and obbligato dog. The intonation kind of went off the rails a bit in this
performance...
Finlandia
Jean Sibelius; arr. ???
Sibelius's famous tone poem, Finlandia. There's a bit of wind damage but otherwise this
track came out reasonably well. Unless I'm imagining it, you can hear somebody in the audience
saying, "Wonderful!" at the very end.
Stardust
Hoagy Carmichael; arr. Dr. Myles L. Skinner
This track is very quiet; you'll either want to turn your computer speakers up or wear decent
headphones. I got as aggressive as I dared with toning down the wind damage and faced a choice
between keeping the whole thing quiet or making it louder and introducing a lot of clipping
which is kind of an unpleasant effect. Probably a professional could find a better solution
but we go with what we've got. I think overall we sound not too bad here.
Low Blow
Jay Chattaway; arr. Dr. Myles L. Skinner
This chart was kind of our signature for a while. There are some very nice moments in this
track, but the wind is definitely picking up again. Perhaps there was a storm brewing.
