"An Indian Prayer" - live Native American flute & lyrics

[hkentcraig]

Below is the link to my "An Indian Prayer" mp3 on my Artist's Page at Amazon.com:

http://hkentcraig.com/AnIndianPrayer

. . . clicking on the link to you to its standalone page at Amazon.com where you can hear a sample of it.

"An Indian Prayer" is my masterwork poem originally published in a national publication in 1980 (and for which I hold the copyright on) that at latest count has been stolen, errrrr, reprinted(Smile) in fifteen different languages over the years. About seven or eight years ago I recorded a spoken word version of it using DAK Recording Software and posted it in various places around the web including my own personal website.

A couple of months back I decided to go through the (free) process of creating my (music and mp3 files) Artist's Page at Amazon.com and having had MX5 for a couple of years now and having played with it enough to be dangerous, I decided to take the plunge and re-master this and other soundfiles also previously recorded.

First thing I did was to bring in the old original mp3 of spoken word-only words/lyrics using the "Add Sound File" function in the "Mix" popdown menu.

Next I recorded a live Native American Indian flute track, I've been taking NA flute lessons for around 4 years now and for this played my Mike Elkins '07 flute made from native Oklahoma red cedar to create a "top track" that acoustically stays just below the vocals. I used my Chinese-made studio quality mic to record the live flute without any external or internal sweetening. Since it was a direct feed to the laptop without using an external mic preamp or mixing board with phantom power, I boosted the audio of it within MX5 to 200% so it wouldn't be buried by the vocals.

Then for a Native Drum effect I created a track where I selected "heartbeat" from MX5's built-in selection of sound effects and that lower-register bottom track effect when added to the previous two was perfect, sounded just like a "real" Native Drum being played softly in the background.

I've also used MX5 to remaster a whole bunch of pre-existing spoken word mp3's, mainly oral presentations of some of my better previously published columns on (mechanical contracting) project management and estimating from "Contractor" magazine and post them to my main Amazon Artist's Page which can be found at:

http://hkentcraig.com/MyAmazonMP3s

The spoken word columns were also originally done with DAK software and to make them sound cleaner and better I used MX5 to remaster them, bring them in as single tracks respectively and using MX5's Acoustic Compressor's "Vocal - Live Recording" preset to give it depth and sweeten the pitch of my recorded voice before mixing each in turn down to mp3 format for publication through Amazon.

Now that I'm using MX5 more frequently to restore and renew older stuff I'm looking forward to creating new musical works, my next project will be an album of contemporary Native American flute expressions, using MX5 - hopefully soon MX6 and the journey continues.