There are now about ten third party recordings of “Offend Maggie” up on CASH Music, and most of them *aren’t electronic*. These are live bands which took the trouble to do a killer version of a brand new and fairly hard song.
I especially like Matthew Walker’s fast prog-rock version with a full band.
Jack Hasselbring’s Arrangement for 2nd or 3rd year band (Grade 1.5 – 2) is also way cool. From his page for the project:
My experience with younger bands has taught me to arrange sparsely, with little “clutter”, so the three parts of the arrangement translated nicely to a beginning band arrangement. My primary considerations were playability and fun. The more complex rhythms of the piece would be difficult for 5th or 6th graders to read, but they would do fine if taught them “by rote”. Some of the low brass parts are a bit difficult – trombone uses 7th position unless a trigger is used. The xylophone and bell parts are important, so substitutions would be needed if they aren’t available. Enjoy!
It’s really special and unique that this is net-native Creative Commons music played on live instruments.
Most net-native music is electronic, I think because of how easy and cheap it is to use computers to make music. As soon as you touch a mic the amount of trouble goes way up, and if you need a whole band recorded then it’s not even feasible for most people to find the players, much less do a studio session. So electronic music is becoming dominant in the current generation because of the favorable economics.
But with all of these Offend Maggie versions the situation is reversed. What happened? The difference is writing out the music, which enables skilled players to perform a new piece with a bare minimum of work. Not many people can read music, but the productivity of people who can read approaches the productivity of computer musicians. And it’s significant that the live versions, like aaron novik’s moody stack of bass clarinets are mainly solo multi-track recordings.
Both the prog rock one and the elementary orchestra one are great. My own efforts to play with the MIDI sound a lot more like the latter than the former.
More like the orchestra than the prog rock! I’m surprised. That’s not a typical mode for electronic music.
Incidentally, there’s Sibelius for the elementary orchestra so I can export MIDI for you if you want it.
Hey, thanks for the nice words. I suppose I have a situation most don’t – a band room full of instruments and recording equipment. Deerhoof is a very kid-friendly band, and I am always looking for music that would translate well into band arrangements, so Fresh Born was a no-brainer.
I’ll bet that’s a fun song for kids. Deerhoof has a sense of humor that they would dig.