O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

When our pastor started getting this year's Christmas cantata put together he asked Bethany and I to do a piano/fiddle duet for the program. I'm thinking this is going to be no problem, we could do O Holy Night like we did another time or something similar. But a few days later Bethany e-mailed me the link to the Piano Guy's sheet music to O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Ugh! I don't like sheet music! It's so much work. Why can't we just come up with our own arrangement by ear? But I knew this was something Bethany really wanted to do so I ordered the music download (all 9 pages of it!) and we got to work. We both thought we would only do half the song since the second half was a harder key, but we pushed ourselves through the whole song and now I can't imagine only playing half of it!

Looking back at the experience I am reminded that there are rewards when I do hard things. If I had never ordered the music I wouldn't have the pleasure of playing such a beautiful song or the enjoyment of blessing others with our melodies. Bethany and I also had the joy of spending many hours together laughing at our mistakes and  sharing our excitement over how much fun we were having! I am so glad we did it!

Since this is probably the biggest song we've done together, we decided to video it. We transformed our piano room into a recording studio complete with Bethany's camera lights and tri-pod. Amy was a great videographer! It was a lot more work than we expected and a lot more fun! Three hours and seven videos later we finally had to take a break so I could give a piano lesson. We thought we would have to resume our project the next day, but we found one that we all agreed was good enough.

The first video is our complete song and the second one is the bloopers. You may not find them unamusing, but we thought they were funny and it will give you an idea of how it came together. :)

I hope y'all have a merry Christmas!

 

Bloopers! : )