Tanda: Pugliese with Jorge Vidal

This tanda has been one of my favorites for a long time, but this is
quite challenging music, and I do not play it often. Here it goes:

Title	Orchestra	Singer	Year	BPM
Puente Alsina	Osvaldo Pugliese	Jorge Vidal	1949	65
La cieguita	Osvaldo Pugliese	Jorge Vidal	1949	63
Ventanita de arrabal	Osvaldo Pugliese	Jorge Vidal	1950	62
Barra querida	Osvaldo Pugliese	Jorge Vidal	1950	62

Here you can listen to the tanda on Spotify:


Michal Lavokah writes on milonga.co.uk:

In 1949, singer Jorge Vidal was homeless, and sleeping in the back of the bar where he performed. Pugliese discovered him and asked him to join his orchestra. Vidal agreed, but free spirit that he was he stayed only a year before going solo once again. They recorded only eight sides together.

Jorge Vidal (fra todotango)

This tanda, half of what they did together, consists solely of "Guardia Vieja" compositions. "Ventanita de arrabal", for instance, has been recorded by Juan Maglio and Francisco Canaro
(separately, of course) back in 1927. That song forms the climax of the tanda, at least for me, partly due to it's wonderful piano part. Listen to the achingly beautiful piano playing at 2:12:
Right before, the the violins dissolve the music into a moment of absolute tranquility. This is the same way the song introduced the voice of Vidal at 0:49, but this time Pugliese plays the theme pianissimo, almost caressing the keys, before Vidal takes over. Magnificent...

After this intense song, "Barra querida" wraps it up, starting with a more insisting beat. With the whistling (for instance at 0:36), my hope is that this song will restore the happy mood of the evening.

What is he playing?

Last Monday, at Robert's practica, I premiered my new system for displaying what I play during my DJ sets. Since I searched long and hard for a pre-made solution, with no luck, I will share with you what I did to make it work.

First to the end result. On my DJ-stand, I have a small LCD screen facing the dancers. I dim the lights to the minimum to make it as non-disturbing as possible, yet visible from across the room. The display shows information like this:

The most important information is the orchestra, and this is visible from across the room for those with good eyes (not me). For those passing by the stand, I also display the type (tango/vals/milonga etc), year, title and singer (if any). I wanted to give it a clean look, therefore everything except the orchestra is given a small font. By the way, this song is from a brand new tanda, made from a CD that arrived to my mail box this morning! Look out for it next Monday! :-)

And for the cortinas, I have another layout:

I hope my choice of cortinas do not make this display of 'Cortina' needed, but for the beginners it might be nice. I also show artist and title, as I often ask myself that question during a cortina I like.

So to the technical details

As explained in a different post, I use Foobar 2000 as my DJ software. After searching wikis and forums, I found the 'Now Playing Simple' plugin. Thank you, Skipy Rich, for making that available!!

The plugin writes information about the currently playing song to a file. I have configured it as follows:

As you can see, it writes the information to the file 'np.csv' on my Desktop. The formatting string you see is:

$if(%isplaying%,
$if(%ispaused%,
paused
,
playing
);%type%;%artist%;%title%;%singer%;%date%,
stopped
)

Then I needed to display that file in a nice way. I therefore wrote a simple Java servlet program to read the file, parse it, and output a nicely formatted HTML page. That servlet is right now a big hack, but it works. If you are interested in the code, please let me know! I will then see if I can tidy it up a bit, and release it under a open source license.

Some interesting (?) details:

I use Jquery quickfit to adjust the size of the text. That way, I make sure the text fits, no matter how long the song title, name of the orchestra, etc.

I use Maven Console Plugin to package the servlet into an executable file. When I start DJing, I simply double-click on the packaged file, and I am ready to go! Thanks to you, my colleague at Kantega, Eirik Bjørsnøs, for making computer programming simpler!

I then display the HTML on an external screen using Google Chrome. As the HTML is available over the network, I could also display it some other places. For example an iPad closer to where the people are in the milonga.

DJ setup

As a computer programmer, I have certain advantages. The most important is that I am often less satisfied with common solutions, knowing I could, with a lot of time and effort, make a better one for my needs. That leads me to the conclusion that someone else already has done that, and the search begin.

With tango music, I often see people use iTunes, which I have never liked. My search for something better quickly took me to a blog post by the tango DJ 'Simba Tango', describing a setup with Foobar 2000. I have mostly used the setup he describes in his blog post, with some customizations to my own desires. I will here show you how I use Foobar 2000 to DJ, but first use the space to thank Simba Tango for sharing his setup: Thank you, Simba Tango!

Two instances of Foobar 2000 as tango my DJ software

To the left I browse my music, and this instance is directed to my computer's internal sound card and my headphones. To the right, I have the playlist currently playing, connected to an external sound card and the PA system in the room. I drag files over from left to right to add them to the playlist.

In the instance playing for the public, I have nothing but the playlist, grouped by orchestra and type (milonga, waltz, tango etc). In addition, I display the singer (if any) and year. This is information I would like to be easily available when I can not remember exactly what I have played earlier in the evening. I would also like to be able to display this information to the dancers, but I have not yet found a solution for this.

The instance playing for the public

The instance I use for browsing my music is divided into three columns. Here I have customized the setup for my needs, and use the Foobar component Columns UI.


The left-most column shows me all the artists I have in my library, with a new row for each type (milonga, waltz, tango etc). At the bottom, I have the cover art of the currently selected song in column number three. This helps me remembering the song, for instance which version of the same song has the best audio fidelity.

List of artists

As column number two, I have pre-made tandas. I also save all my DJ events, so I can go back and see what I actually played.

Pre-made tandas and saved playlists

The tandas are organized in a tree-like structure of folders, and put in playlists. The folders categorize the tandas, and the playlists have a name describing the tanda. See some examples below:

Tandas categorized and with descriptions

As my last column, I have the songs contained in the selection made in one of the other two columns. For example, the picture below shows the songs displayed when I have selected Pedro Laurenz - Tango in the left-most column:

Some of my tangos by Pedro Laurenz

This column is grouped by singer, displaying those without (instrumentals) first. Inside these groups, I have sorted the songs on the year they were recorded. I have also access to my own comments, the album, length and beat per minute (BPM) for the songs. The BPM is not always accurate for my tangos, but for waltzes and milongas I find the beat manually and use that a lot when making tandas.

How this is done is shown below:

Finding the tempo of a song

As a last feature, I show you how I can use the powerful search function of Foobar 2000 when I am making tandas.

The following search gives me slow milongas recorded before 1945, sorted by date:

type IS milonga AND date LESS 1945 AND BPM LESS 95 SORT BY date

I can then pre-listen to the songs, and create tandas on-the-fly. 

Searching for slow milongas

I also use some other Foobar features to control playback volume and the gap between songs, but they are better described by Simba Tango in his excellent blog post. Thank you again, Simba Tango!

Tanda (vals): Pugliese with Chanel

I love the music of Osvaldo Pugliese, especially the tracks he did in the 40s together with the singer Roberto Chanel. Unfortunately, my collection contains only two waltzes with them. To be sure I am not missing tracks, I checked with a query at tango.info. It turns out that those two waltzes are the only ones available, forcing me to mix in other artists to create a set of three waltzes for a tanda.

Browsing my current collection, I filtered the waltzes on the same year as the Pugliese/Chanel ones, the year 1944. This led me to the waltz Temblando by Laurenz/Bermúdez, which I felt completed the tanda.

Title	Orchestra	Singer	Year	BPM
Puentecito de mi río	Osvaldo Pugliese	Roberto Chanel	1944	65
Temblando	Pedro Laurenz	Carlos Bermúdez	1944	63
Tu casa ya no está	Osvaldo Pugliese	Roberto Chanel	1944	62

Here you can listen to the tanda on Spotify:


Not knowing Spanish, I can only guess the content of the songs using Google translate. This crude translation does only help me in remembering the songs, not in appreciating them.

The first song, Puentecito de mi río, is about an old stone bridge, and I imagine the light piano playing in the beginning is the water bubbling in the river beneath. The bridge enables the singer to get to some beautiful place. Later in the song, the bridge is destroyed, and the singer has to overcome the river to enable his songs to cross.

The second song, Temblando, tells a story of a man meeting a beautiful, young girl when he stays at her ranch. The title translated to "trembling", and that is all he is able to do. Instead of talking to her, he rides away at full speed, bearing with him only the memories and emotions of the encounter.

In the last song, the singer is telling someone that the home of their youth is no longer. The song seems to use quite poetic sentences, because Google translate is not making much sense on this one. Anyway, the title translates to something like "Your home is no more".