My small tour ends with the final concert in the capital and for this occasion I have invited many fellow musicians to play with me, too. The percussionists that I had for the recording couldn’t make it for the concert but they suggested that I contact Mr. Riho Ridbeck from the legendary Hortus Musicus. He agreed and we had a rehearsal already and I like his playing very much! As I said before – the limit between a solo guitar concert or album and a chamber ensemble sound is a very thin and my intention is still to have a solo guitar thing. So I expect the drummers to be polite 
The other change was that although my initial inspiration for the Asturias was Guillem Alonso, the step-dancer from Spain, I had to take somebody else for that occasion and since we have nobody similar around, I had to work with flamenco dancers again. I invited Maria Rääk from Amargo and she created an original choreography for this piece. It seems that I’ve made many new friends while working on my Dance Album!
Also I have Jorma Puusaag on the second guitar (the Danza Brasileira!), Anne Anderson on castagnets and hand clapping (the Spanish pieces) and Ardo Västrik on violoncello (the Estonian folkdance!). I even took up the lute for this concert. I have not played it for a while but it makes sense to play Dowland with it.
After the concert – everything went very well! There was enough people in the hall and they seemed to enjoy the program and the idea behind it. I had many friends and students among the audience since it was the official presentation of The Dance Album. Here are some pictures that Pelle, the artist of my CD, took.
So, The Dance Album is now officially released and the big work is done for now! It is time to thank all the people who contributed and there are surprisingly many of them:
Viljar Kuusk - my luthier, I play his guitar from 2003 on this CD
Aili Jõeleht – Sound engineer
Marika Scheer – Digital editor
Mirje Mändla - Producer
Pelle Kalmo and Mari-Liis Laanemaa - Design and photos
New Apostolic Church of Keila – recorded from 4th to 6th September 2007
Robert Staak – percussion, advice on the early music pieces
Maria Staak – percussion
Anne Anderson – castagnets, handclapping
Maria Rääk – live dance and choreography
Riho Ridbeck - percussion
Jorma Puusaag - percussion on the guitar
Published by: Kitarrikool Records 2008
Here are some more of the ideas that my artist gave to me when I was planning the tour. Only one of them was chosen (the one with blue and white) but there was some kind of misunderstanding between the pdf file and the printing software so it omitted the blue color at all and it turned out all white! It was fair enough, though.
I know that every guitar CD, guitar banner or poster must have a big guitar on it so everybody understands that it is connected to the guitars. My duo album follows that rule and many many other things, too. But the Dance Album cover doesn’t have a guitar on it and those posters here, too. Who would tell that it is a guitar over my shoulder?
The other one (at the right side) has a guitar but it isn’t me on the picture so I did not choose it. The black one a few posts back doesn’t have nor the guitar or the man.
There were also some colour variations of every poster. Usually, I like to get my posters designed under my own control, because otherwise it often turnes out that there is a man with whatever kind of guitar on the picture (electric guitar!). It happens more often that you would imagine. For many people guitar is either the metal string western dreadnought or the electric guitar and I cannot blame them: see for yourselft that the search term “classical guitar” is less than 10% of the search volume of “acoustic guitar” and “electric guitar”.
So those 100 million people who search for the “guitar” every month are only about 6-7% likely to search for the classical guitar. So eventually – who cares what kind of guitar do you have on your poster – as long as it is not a violoncello or something!
The Dance Album tour continues on the islands. First is Saaremaa.
I spent my schoolyears on the island Saaremaa and have been playing the guitar in this building on countless occasions. It is a mysterious place. “The castle is the only medieval fortification in the Baltic States that has not undergone considerable alterations and due to that is an internationally important architectural monument,” says the webpage of the Saaremaa museum. The first remained documents about this building date back to 1380-s.
There are different rooms where one can play but most often the concerts take place in the festive refectory (on the second picture). You can imagine the reverb of the room! In this place the time stands still and it happened again to me that after playing the program no-one moved I went to the other room and was waiting to come out again and play my encore which in this program is the 13th track of the CD – the only Estonian piece in the entire program. 
But people where quiet and I didn’t dare to come out again. So they were sitting for many minutes and it was a very very pieceful moment. There is something very special about this place so it is worth to come and see it from whatever corner of the world.
I have organised a lute duo concert there and it was superb! Also, I remember that during the music school time the National Broadcast recorded us there but years later when I tried to find the tapes from the radio archive, they weren’t there!
One day I will record something in this building and I have an idea to record different tracks in different rooms and times and do something like an acoustic map of this place. I remember a concert tour to Sicily with my trio where we played in an ancient Greek theatre (Palazzolo Acreide) The local people said that this place has very nice acoustics. I thought that they meant that the building has the acoustics but they insisted that I would understand thet the PLACE has the acoustics and that is exactly why this building is built there And I believe it. People were not stupid in the past.
So three of the concerts are done and the last two of them were in Southern Estonia: Võru and Tartu. The latter is the second biggest town that we have. I have organized guitar concerts for many years as the chairman of the Estonian Guitar Sociey and have always been searching suitable halls for classical guitar. In Tartu the situation is quite good as they have some nice museums and the main hall of the University of Tartu.
This time my choice was the City Museum. The museum is not very old but the house itself has some historical significance. It was built by Lt Woldemar Conrad von Pistohlkorsi in 1790 and is somehow connected to the Catherine the Great of Russia. Probably she stayed there while visiting Tartu.
The hall has a wonderful sound for the classical guitar and the only problem is that the windows are facing the street but when you choose a quiet time for the concert then it is OK.
This small tour is the first occasion when I play all the pieces from my new guitar record live and in a row. Of course, I practiced at home:) I play exactly as it is on the CD exept that I don’t have percussionists (I will have on the final concert in Tallinn) and also I explain a lot about the choice of the dances and the history of them, too.
I like communicating during my recitals – I want to break this awful type of concerts when everybody must be silent and listen hands on knees. I always try to keep the audience interested and try to make them more familiar to my person, too. Then we have a free communication and the music also does its job better.
In a live concert situation there is a big problem that many players have and me too: it is the first piece of the concert. How to go directly into the mood? Later everything will be fine but how to break the ice fast? My album begins with the branle and saltarello that are not technically difficult but nevertheless I tend to make small mistakes in the beginning.
From 8th to 26th of April I have scheduled a small tour around Estonia to play the program of my new album. There are seven concerts and they are in all different places – I start the tour in an old church then continue in a culture center in South Estonia, then an old museum house, then the oldest castle of the Baltics, then a museum again on an island and a culture centre again and finally a concert in the capital – Tallinn.
So the venues are all different in size and acoustics. The tour is organized by my own company Kitarrikool OY and we got some support from the Estonian Fund of Culture and the Association of Estonian Professional Musicians and the rest I cover from the ticket sales.
As I said before – I didn’t get my CD ready for the first church recital but it nevertheless was a good concert. I’ll tell more in the next few posts. On the picture you see a variation of my tour’s banner that I didn’t choose eventually.
Of course, everything went too fast again but on the last minute we got the material to the factory and after a week or so it was there – my new CD!
The reason why I was in a hurry with the production was that I had scheduled a small live tour already and of course I wanted to get my album by this time. But it happened that on two first concerts I didn’t have it yet 
I think that every time when I’ve received a new CD from the factory where I play, I’ve listened to it in the car for the first time. Where else would I listen to it So I put it on and then it is always a nervous 45 minutes to find out is everything ok and at the same time taking a closer look to the cover etc.
This time everything was just as I planned so I was really happy!
With this CD I was lucky enough to get Pelle and Mariliis from Sotapota to work on my CD’s artwork. It was obvious that the artwork had to be connected to the dance topic but it took some time to get the final idea that we used.
First we started with a photo session and made hundreds of photographs. Many of them are now in my guitar method book. But you find many motifs from the photos from my Dance Album, too.
There are different boxes for CD-s and from working in the radio station I knew that the old regular jewel box is the best in many ways. But I also knew that I had to send my album via regular mail to many countries and then it is the weight and durability that matters. Our choice was 3-sided digipak with the booklet (24 pages) clued to the left side and the transparent tray in the middle.
This was the form of the artwork but how should it look and what kind of information should it carry? I’ve seen thousands of classical music CD-covers in radio that doesn’t tell you anything except for the titles of the tracks. Not even the length of them but this is a highly relevant thing in the radio work! And my CD was designed for the radio stations in all ways.
So everything was to be very practical (normal tracklist at the back with track durations and the proper names of the composers with their living years) but it wasn’t enough to form a artwork.
I order artworks for many CD-s and books and flyers and posters and websites every year. Not to mention the stickers, sales propositions etc! So I have a lot of experience when it comes to the cooperation with artists and designers. And there is one thing that I really hate: this is when they expect ME to decide everything and make me choose from tens of similar variations. I am not a visual artist and that’s why I want them to do the job. Of course I must like the outcome but when an artist is taking it seriously then I don’t have a slightest chance to make better decisions.
This time it was different! I got almost the complete work (on the last day, of course!). I had come across the treatise by Thoinot Arbeau (1558) that is one of the main sources for the information relating to the historical dance. It includes dance tablatures and they look great! Look at these:
So I had sent them off to Pelle and he had found some better copy of the book and here we are: the artwork has now 2 layers. One is the historical treatise and the other is from our photo session. It couldn’t be better and this is really one of the few times when I did not want to change anything! And I still like the work very much. Pelle has won some contests with his CD-covers before and my CD has also been nominated here and there.
Mostly the people in radio that do the editing are different from those who take the music up. In some cases it can be the same person as it was with our guitar duo cd. The main principles in the radio are to use as little after editing as possible. The sound should be the room’s own sound, the compression is not allowed and so on. But the music was taken up with 4-5 microphones and mixed together at the same time so it would have been very difficult to change anything and remain natural.
As I said – I regretted a little bit that we have only 2-3 takes of every piece. Sometimes it meant that we had no choice if there was some mistake in one take. In the beginning when the editor received the material she was a little bit surprised that there were so few sound files. She thought that at least half of them are missing because usually the guitarists have much more takes
But – as with many things: you will forget as time passes by. But my problem is that I am still playing that program live and am technically better than ever so I think I could play it another way now thow I doubt that I would have the fresh feeling that I had. I don’t listen to this CD often but occasionally I hear it from radio and then there is virtually nothing that would still bother me.
The mastering process was longer – I felt that the first versions were too natural as my ultimate goal was to get this disc played in radio stations. So I found a movie sound engineer who did something that they in the radio would not have done – he compressed the material and did some versions for me. I think I chose one of the softer compressions as there was a real tough one, too
Listen to those tracks and decide for yourself:
The first version of radio – Bourree by Bach mp3
The first version with compression – Bourree by Bach
If I think of myself laying back in my armchair and having one of those perfect headphones on, there is little doubt that I would choose the version without compression. But thinking of what awful equipment for listening to the music people use nowadays! I bet you’re listening those tracks through your laptop’s speakers
Unfortunately mp3 is a compressed format anyhow and I cannot upload the .wav file which is too big so I hope that one day you hear it from the CD, too. The CD version is somewhere between those two examples.
My small tour ends with the final concert in the capital and for this occasion I have invited many fellow musicians to play with me, too. The percussionists that I had for the recording couldn’t make it for the concert but they suggested that I contact Mr. Riho Ridbeck from the legendary Hortus Musicus. He agreed and we had a rehearsal already and I like his playing very much! As I said before – the limit between a solo guitar concert or album and a chamber ensemble sound is a very thin and my intention is still to have a solo guitar thing. So I expect the drummers to be polite 
