The Narrators
The Musicians
The Recordings
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The Salmon's Tail

The Recordings

The paintings of Salmon are by Wildlife Artist Alan Hayman and prints are available direct from his Gallery at

ahsd1

stjf2 Od and new Bi-Naural Recordings of locations will be added shortly.

As the recording of the Premiere was non-existent, i recorded the various sections via Midi in 1992 at the Forge Studio in Balmerino. These were the early days of 'Digital Recording' which was far from being a stable or even sonically accurate medium of Recording. However and fortuitously, i owned an Analoge Multitrack (Tape) Recorder and when Phil began recording his part, we recorded it onto Tape. Gradually over the next 5 years i added the recordings/performances of the other musicians as and when they appeared. Also onto tape as did Peter Grimes and Jock Ferguson. I also started making Bi Naural recordings of locations along the River pertinent to the story, as i always heard Mother Natures voice as an integral part of the sonic vision, given that many of the compositional idea's came from the sounds of the landscape and wildlife i regularly encountered.

1999 i attempted to produce a mix of the piece and spent nearly 2 years failing to do justice to either it or to the contributing recordings/performances captured. The idea was abandoned as life and other musical projects made their demands.

We lost Peter Grimes in 2014 and after Stanley Pelc passed in 2015, i committed to try again to produce a mix that more accurately represented the sonic vision glimpsed in 1991 and which might serve to celebrate the lives and contributions both Peter and Stan gave to the piece through inspiration and performance.

From April to September 2016 i began transferring all my Analogue Mutitracks to the Digital domain, which has matured to be a viable and nowadays, most conveniant of Recording methods.

I won't get into the 'tape versus digital' debate here, other than to say that personally, i don't think digital has the same sonic warmth or the discipline we all got used to in the days of recording onto tape. However, anything recorded on tape does bring the warmth and attitude of the recording with it when transferred to the digital medium and on re-discovering those tape recorded performances was confident that we could make an accurate production of the piece for commercial release.

We (me) re-recorded the score in sync with the tape recordings between September 2016 and Apri 2017 and from then till December 2017 the mixing of the Music. The Narrative recordings were transferred as were my original location recordings and the mixing of all the elements mixed by both Phil and me and took us to March this year (2018). While both Peter Grimes (as St Peter) and Jock Ferguson had contributed wonderfully animated narratives, i wanted a softer reading, so i chanced my mitt (as we say) and asked Pat Santos (Stanleys Brother and comedian ST Andrew) if he would donate his voice as a Narrator and he did!!. The whole production consists of 3 versions: Two different main narrators with music and location recordings (both with Peter Grimes as St Peter) and one which is just music and location recordings.