In the 1980's, I recorded a series of self-produced solo projects- "John McGann Mandolin and Guitar", "Off Center", and "John McGann Plays Bach, Debussy, and Rodrigo". The latter developed from a friend's casual comment about how it might be good to do a project that features one style of music, rather than seven. I decided to select some music that I liked that would need to be specifically arranged for the instruments I play- in this case, mandolin, mandola, mandocello and guitar. My good friend John Zeidler had created a pair of beautiful instruments, the mandocello and mandola, for a great mutual pal named Stewart Rotchford. Stew was kind enough to loan me these axes to use along with my Zeidler mando and dreadnought guitars. Sadly, John passed away in 2002 of leukemia. To my knowledge, this is the only recording that features the sound of his instruments exclusively. All three mando family instruments are F style archtops, while the guitar is a dreadnought, voiced with John Zeidler's amazing penchant for a balance between low and high, and great piano-like harmonic content on the wound strings.

I acquired the scores of the music and set to arranging for various combinations of these four instruments. The pieces are originally composed for keyboard, lute, chorus, and in the case of the Rodrigo, an entire orchestra! I worked at a very relaxed pace creating the scores and parts by hand (in the pre-computer days, mind you), and recording the pieces as time allowed in my humble home studio, which was my bedroom with a "sound booth" made by hanging blankets from the ceiling.

As this was before the computer era, I had to think of a way to deal with keeping "in time" when the music needed to breathe rhythmically (alias "rubato"). My solution was to record a baseline click track onto cassette. I would then record a track onto the Teac clapping and singing the melody, and when the time needed to pull back, I would do so and use the click as a guide to recover "a tempo" when needed. Probably not the most elegant solution, but it worked!

I used a Countryman condensor microphone, and tracked onto a wonderful analog Teac 4 track machine also loaned by my friend Stewart, with the aid of rented Dolby noise reduction. After about a year and a half of occasional fits and starts, I had assembled the music and took it to engineer Bob Reardon's home studio, where over the course of three or four evenings we mixed late into the night, often with four hands on the board, from analog onto the Sony digital VCR tape that was the high tech solution of 1989. As you'll hear (at least on some of the tracks), I am not a big fan of the overuse of reverb, and leaned toward having the mixes be "ambient" without being overly "wet" or "dry" sounding, although if I were to remix today I would have them even drier. From there, the duplicated cassettes sold literally tens of copies. I recently listened and found the playing was not as bad as I remembered it, and decided to make it available again in a very limited edition release.

My "remastering" from DAT to audio CD via 32 bit conversion merely added some gain for the CD release- no Pro Tools, extra reverb, compression, or other gloss. 

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Click on links to listen, or download by right-clicking (Mac users option-click)

Side one

1. First Arabesque (Debussy)

2. Second Arabesque (Debussy)

3. Prelude/Allemande from Partita #1 in Bb (JS Bach)

4. Adagio-Concerto de Aranjuez (Rodrigo)

Also side one

5. Serenade to the Doll from The Children's Corner (Debussy)

6. Goldberg Variation #21 (JS Bach)

7. Goldberg Variation #26 (JS Bach)

8. Gigue, from Lute Suite #1 (JS Bach)

9. Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, from Cantata #147 (JS Bach)

10. Passpied, from Suite Bergamasque (Debussy)

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SOON TO BE AVAILABLE AS DIGITAL DOWLOAD

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