Oíche Suaimhneach, Fir Caoin

I had picked up Loreena McKennitt's album, A Midwinter Night's Dream, back in October and enjoyed her renditions of some of the classic Christmas tunes. In particular, I really enjoyed God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, which was actually based on one of her previous songs, Marco Polo.

The album was also blessed with a few instrumental versions of some of the songs, including God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. The temptation to produce a Christmas mashup with this instrumental was brewing... I just needed something else to go with it.

It wasn't until the end of November when I stumbled upon the Mediaeval Baebes song and I immediately thought that this was the song that I needed. I wasn't able to start working on it until the middle of December, but I had some solid ideas, so the little time I had in front of my music production software between Christmas shopping sprints was very productive.

I felt that using an Irish/Gaelic title seemed more suitable for this multi-cultural sounding mashup. I had to do a little research on Irish/Gaelic phrase/dictionary web sites to figure out an appropriate and (hopefully) correctly phrased title... Google and Babel Fish still don't have an Irish/Gaelic translator.

I determined that one of the words in the song Umlahi was "suaimhneach", which was a difficult task since I couldn't find lyrics for the song and had to rely on what I was hearing and my limited knowledge (i.e. none) of Gaelic. I found out that suaimhneach means peaceful, quiet, or tranquil... which was a good starting point for naming this mashup.

Based on the word peaceful, I thought an appropriate title for this mashup in the English language would be Peaceful Night, Gentlemen. So after a little more research on the Irish/Gaelic phrase/dictionary sites, I determined the rest of the words and phrasing and came up with Oíche Suaimhneach, Fir Caoin.

If anyone reading this has a good understanding of Irish/Gaelic, I'd be interested in hearing your interpretation of my translation as I understand that context, region of influence, etc., can produce different interpretations of phrases.

I hope you enjoy this little Xmashup. And I hope you and your family enjoy a peaceful holiday season. Otherwise, have a satisfactory non-denominational capitalist wintertime gift-giving season.

Oíche Suaimhneach, Fir Caoin
Mediaeval Baebes - Umlahi
Loreena McKennitt - God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen (Abdelli version)
Loreena McKennitt - God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen (Instrumental)
6:05 / 256 kbps / 11.3 MB

Download the MP3 file here.

I Won, I Won, I Won!

It's not everyday, nor every year for that matter, that I win a contest or lottery, especially one that requires reading, memory, a little Internet digging, and answering more than 1 question correctly. I have enough trouble remembering anything that happened over 3 days ago, so remembering a week's worth of posts by someone is a challenge. ;)

Thank goodness I found Morgan Page's VIP Blogger Series interesting and fairly short (thanks Morgan), so it was fun to read and (fairly) easy to remember. Ok, I'll admit I had to go back to a couple of postings to refresh my memory, but the effort paid off in the end.

The guys at Nettwerk had contacted me the day after the contest closing with the good news and to obtain my shipping info, and I had the prize package in my hands the following day. A big thanks to Lex and Brian at Nettwerk for their very courteous and prompt service (with a little help from the fast delivery service of Canada Post).

My kid immediately swiped the Peterson Tuners cap with the cool strobe logo on the front (mind you, I don't look good in baseball caps, so I was okay with that)... but no one else was getting the T-shirt! As for the StroboSoft software-based strobe tuner... it looks like my kid's going to start playing electric guitar very soon, so he and his friends are going to need to be tuned up.

I look forward to seeing additional informative and fun blogger series like this at APC, as well as other cool contests (who doesn't like free stuff?).