[DECtalk] A MIDI Transcript I have created

[Ulysses Harmony Garcia]

Hello y'all,

I usually don't post here, but I wanted to share with you a winter 
holiday song that I found way back in 2009, and which has since then 
been my favourite rendition. In fact, I loved it so much that I even 
offered it to a potential a cappella group that I had once signed up to 
audition for, just before COVID hit. I unfortunately don't have it in 
sheet music form, but given that it's now in MIDI format, the 
possibilities of creating one are endless!

Even though my hearing was much better than it it is now, I had a lot of 
trouble in deciphering each of the five different voice parts and what 
they were doing, for my knowledge of music theory was also quite 
limited, and I therefore assumed there were only four voice parts (I had 
tried using a karaoke centre pan removing feature in Audacity). What I 
didn't realise, until many years later, was that it had consequentially 
removed a fifth voice part that was crucial to adding that unique 
texture that I had so long craved to replicate. Since I already had a 
working MIDI file that I had previously created with QWS, it was only a 
matter of going back and add the missing part, and at long last I had 
made a near exact copy of that song!

The artistic director even agreed with me and said that it was complex, 
dynamic, and fun! However, they wanted to know, for a host of reasons, 
if I had been the original arranger, and I had to explain that I hadn't 
been able to figure out who had been behind it, and that I just happened 
to like it so much that I decided to transcribe it into MIDI form. They 
said they'd add it to their song suggestions. Well, since then we 
haven't been able to move forward because of loss of revenue, thanks to 
COVID, so I don't know if we'll ever get a chance to perform it.

But I'm glad of one thing. A couple days ago, I was researching the 
Internet Archive and Wayback Machine, and by some mere chance I happened 
to stumble on this Reddit post about VocalWriter being abandonware. It 
turns out that Flint Million, who was a heavy user of it at the time, 
along with Hugh Emerson, had been inspired by hearing a live a cappella 
version of that song, and so he ended up creating his own cover!  What's 
more, he's hoping to bring back VocalWriter in a whole new way, so I am 
including the link to the discussion, that others who are interested may 
read. 
https://www.reddit.com/r/abandonware/comments/p59cb6/vocalwriter_a_completely_abandoned_singing_vocal/


Happy holidays,


_Ulysses H. Garcia, KJ7ERC
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