Astute readers of this blog will remember that on 18 January the Frankfurt SCD Club e.V. held its annual “Tea Dance”, which this year featured a celebration of the life and works of the great SCD teacher and deviser, the late Malcolm Brown. One of the dances we tried was the two-four-couple-set 80-bar strathspey, Highland Cathedral, and we did manage to publish a video of the workshop participants performing it (see below). Here are a few notes about making that video.
First of all, I should mention that Highland Cathedral, the tune, is something that under normal circumstances I quite thoroughly detest. Written fairly recently by Ulrich Röver and Michael Korb (two Germans), it has a way of insinuating itself into one's brain and staying there for hours if not days. It doesn't sound like a Scottish tune at all and as such is perfect for bagpipe players, who seem to enjoy straightforward non-Scottish material. (Remember that the three tunes a bagpipe player needs to know in order to be able to busk in the street are Highland Cathedral, Amazing Grace, and Scotland the Brave, two of which are not Scottish, while the third is a cringe-making patriotic ditty which appeals mostly to sports fans.) (Of course, the latter description would also apply to Flower of Scotland, another cringe-making piece which fortunately doesn't sit well on the pipes.)
Having said that, Malcolm's eponymous dance is really quite fascinating, and while it is perfectly feasible to do it to other 80-bar strathspey recordings, we're gritting our teeth here and using That Tune, because presumably otherwise people would wonder. Fortunately, Malcolm links us to an incredibly cheesy YouTube video containing the music at approximately the requisite length (we'll get back to the “approximately” in due course). The challenge here, naturally, is getting the music out of the video which is something that Google doesn't exactly encourage you to do. The standard YouTube video download tool I occasionally use didn't seem to work here, but of course I'm on Linux and that means I can just snarf the audio off the web browser's channel to the sound card. (In case you're wondering, and also so that I remember how to do this when I come back to the topic half a year from now and have forgotten all the details, on a Pipewire-based system like mine all you need to do is give the
pw-record --target "Google Chrome" file.flac
command and play the video in the browser to obtain a nice losslessly-compressed FLAC file of the audio track.) That goes onto the class PC and is ready to play at the event.
The video of the dance was taken spontaneously by Sabine Meier-Ude on her mobile phone and eventually reached me on a circuitous route (presumably via WhatsApp to Marie, who sent it on to me using Telegram, from which I could download it to my laptop). This must have done the resolution and/or quality no good at all – but under the circumstances it still looks relatively decent, certainly good enough for further work! I use Kdenlive, which is a very reasonable free (“as in freedom”, not just “as in beer”) video editing program that lets me stick “tops and tails” – the standardised title cards at the beginning and end – on the video in no time at all. Also on my new super-fast laptop, video production has become fun again – the previous machine would take many minutes or even hours to render videos to modern encodings like WEBM but the new one is really quite a lot quicker. (Laptops are generally not great for video editing, but I don't do it enough to warrant a purpose-built desktop PC.)
One issue with the video is that the audio wasn't great; it was recorded on the smartphone and if you watch the video closely you can see me gesticulating wildly in the background, which of course was supplemented by loud prompting over the music that is clearly audible in the recording! The fix for that is to use the original music track in place of what's on the video, which with Kdenlive is fortunately very easy: The program has a special function where it computes a “signature” of an audio track and based on that can align two similar audio tracks very precisely in no time at all. So I now have the video track and two audio tracks, one from the actual recording in the hall which includes me shouting and assorted other noises, and the other straight from the YouTube video with no noises (other than the bagpipes, but those of course are intentional). The actual finished video uses the YouTube track for most of the length, except at the very end where everyone is clapping and congratulating one another, which is of course the recorded audio – it would look weird if people clapped but there wasn't the sound of applause. The other advantage is that this way we get to use all of the music, not just the part on the video which is missing a few seconds at the start and at the end (you will note that in the finished video, the music starts when the title card is still showing while the video only cuts across to the dancers right before the dancing begins).
So, a little trickery but a very nice video if I say so myself. Thanks to everyone who cooperated in this impromptu project – we had to do the dance twice because during the first time there was a little chaos, not least because I had explained a few details wrong. But it's great to have a visual document of this rather unusual dance, especially given that so far the Strathspey SCD Database has no crib or diagram. If it encourages more people to try the dance (and remember Malcolm, its author) then the (small) effort has been thoroughly worth it.
Oh, about the “approximately the right length” … If you follow the video closely you will notice that the pipers don't go directly from one repetition of the tune to the next. After every 32 bars there are two “spare bars” in the recording that the dancers must remember to fill with setting. The suspense! But they seem to manage OK.