Sleepy Hollow from Lazy Day by Will Godfrey

Sometime in 1993 I visited the Silent Pool in Surrey (famed for its stunningly clear water and tranquil setting). Inspired, I later had an all night composing session that resulted in a gentle background with three improvisations on top of it. Returning to it several days later I liked the composition, but was horrified by the timing errors. I like to stretch timing on slow lazy tunes but this was way to much. The problem was that I had six tracks that actually meshed with each other very well. It was the overall timing that was really dragging.

The first thing I tried was quantisation, but that was a nightmare to implement and completely destroyed the character of the tune. Then I tried increasing the tempo, but that only helped a little. Defeated, the project went in 'storage'. It wasn't until 2007 that I made another attempt. This time I painstakingly worked on just the last part of the tune, phrase by phrase, careful to retain the relationship between all parts. I also changed all the instrument sounds to their ZynAddSubFX counterparts. This sounded very much better, but I was totally exhausted, so back it went on the ToDo list.

Recently I discovered a new, non-destructive way of adjusting timing of MIDI tracks in Rosegarden so decided to have another go at this. Without giving away too many secrets I can now even adjust the length of individual notes, but across ALL tracks at the same time. No more changing one track, then bringing the others in one at a time to synchronise. It's not perfect, but then I don't think I want 'perfect'. However after nearly 30 years in limbo I'm happy with it. The final change, that gave a surprisingly good result was to shift the key down from C to Bb.

So, finally, from Yoshimi and Rosegarden here is 'Sleepy Hollow'.

Will Godfrey has been involved in music in one form or another since childhood, starting with early piano lessons and progressing through accordion, guitar, harmonica and tin whistle. Eventually, combining his electronics background he moved on to synthesizers and currently soft-synths.