[Harp-L] Night in Tunisia

[Richard Hunter <turtlehill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

A while ago (December?) we had a few recordings of "Night in Tunisia"
floating around this list.  I promised to deliver one on chromatic. Here
it is, for those who are still interested:

http://www.hunterharp.com/NightInTunisiaSolo.mp3

This recording was made last night in my hotel room.  It's played on a
Hohner CX12 chromatic in C through a handheld AKG BT330D mic into a
Tascam 122 USB interface into my laptop running Cakewalk Sonar.  It's a
solo recording with no overdubs or other edits: in other words, what I
played, in real time, is what you hear.  I applied a little compression,
EQ (slightly dropping lows and highs), and reverb to smooth the sound a
little; I just don't like recordings that sound ugly. I rolled off the
bass on the mic during recording using the mic's built-in bass rolloff
switch; this had the effect of cancelling out the bass boost that
naturally occurs up close to a dynamic mic.  I think the results sound
pretty good.  It's amazing what you can do nowadays with a laptop and a
couple of hundred bucks' worth of gear.

A few comments on the playing: as per my previous comments, I think
corner-switching is the right technique for this piece.  It's very hard
to get the accents right with either a pucker or a single-corner tongue
block.  I used corner-switching both on the main melody and on the coda
that ends the piece.  The coda in particular is near impossible to play
right without corner-switching -- it just changes direction too many
times, too quickly, with jumps of a 4th or more.

Finally, this recording is the head only.  Maybe I'll record a chorus or
two of soloing some other time. In any case, the point of this exercise
was to compare techniques for playing the head, so that's what I did.  I
don't recall that any of the diatonic players tried to do the coda, and
maybe there's a reason for that -- I think it would be very, very
difficult to do with any combination of bending and overblowing.  

Enjoy. 

Regards, Richard Hunter
hunterharp.com