Most Ukulele player will definitely know this medley from Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwoʻole. I discovered Iz's cover of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" watching the movie "Meet Joe Black".
This medley was my first video uploaded to Youtube 11 years ago. At the time I was in the UK and wanted to learn a new instrument and the Ukulele was my choice. I bought a soprano uke at the time but due to some technical issue with it and spending time back and forth with the seller, I then moved to a Tenor uke which I'm still using to this day.
With the small success of this first video, I decided to make a tutorial on how to strum like IZ. Most of the tutorial out there are teaching the correct chords but with an alternate easier strumming pattern. At the time, no one was teaching the way IZ was strumming in his cover. After spending days listening to the song and using some audio editor to slow down the audio, I finally managed to get 95% close to the original strumming technique.
I've planned to record the whole song again using the strumming pattern I've discovered but it's been 4 years and I've never got to do it until now. However, instead of singing, I thought I'd be using the Quena and Panflute instead.
Few days after uploading the video to Youtube, I've realised my panflute and quena tracks were having some bad resonance so I decided to remix and remaster the song but unfortunately I could not replace the Youtube video unless I delete it and re-upload it. So I'll just leave it as is and upload the new version on SoundCloud instead.
The new version has a much cleaner flute sound, especially for the panflute. The first version has that ringing sound that was annoying and uncomfortable when listening with head phones. I removed the resonances using Izotope Ozone Spectral Shaper plugin. With the Black Friday deals going on, I also purchased Waves Audio's Vocal Rider and MV2 plugins. Vocal Rider allows you to dynamically adjust the gain of a track to get a more uniform volume without the use of a compressor. MV2 is a compressor that mixes downwards and upward compressor in one plugin. With both of them, it was easier to get a more stable gain (volume) from my Quena track. I had gain instability because I record very close to the microphone and moving even a little bit would affect the gain.
It was fun to do this recording, it was also an opportunity for me to test the new Quena I made for a customer it's all in tune and playing perfectly fine. Will be shipped tomorrow.