I’m delighted to announce that I’ve now uploaded Tricks of the Trade: Part 1 to YouTube. This features dos and don’ts of using the flute sound on keyboards and organs to imitate James Galway. It’s a topic which always proved popular at the festival workshops, so I hope it will provide some enjoyment and information now. Over coming weeks, and internet allowing, I shall be covering other instruments one at a time, including how to make realistic use of the violin, guitar, trumpet and so on. Click here if you’d like to view this first episode. I’d be really pleased to receive your feedback, too. You can comment on YouTube, or use the ‘Contact’ tab at the top of this page.
You may be wondering how I uploaded this video without internet. Well, it was quite eventful. We piled into our tiny Smart car with my laptop and mobile phone, and drove round to the nearest mobile phone mast in a country lane. There I set up my mobile phone as a temporary router and started uploading to YouTube at a scorching pace. It was a scorching day too, so we had the doors and the roof open, and the phone on the roof, pointing at the mast, and covered with a scarf to stop it frying in the sun. All sorts of bugs were whizzing into the car. Then, after 30 minutes of uploading, I ran out of credit on my mobile. Hurriedly, Tony connected his mobile up instead. Just five minutes later we’d used up his data too. We’d only uploaded 89% of the video. So we bundled ourselves back in the car, and drove home as swiftly as was safe, with the laptop still switched on but rapidly draining its battery. We dashed indoors and connected it up to our virtually inert broadband here. With just 11% left to upload, it took 10 hours to finish off. On that basis, loading the whole video from here would have taken 100 hours in all. Like I said, our internet is not of the best…
