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Complete Celt Page 1/3
| Produced by | AMG |  |
| 3CD Audio | 78:32 / 72:54 / 69.54 | |
| Tracks | 82/45/38 | |
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Released |
1999 |
Complete Celt is the tenth in the AMG "Street Series" and is something of a departure for AMG, whose recent releases have focused around dance orientated loops. This collection is described as "AMG bring you a CD of traditional and contemporary Celtic dance music and songs. Authentic traditional style - and new contemporary - slow airs, laments and ballads from some of the most creative musicians on the scene. What the blues is to American music, Celtic music is to the North and Western fringes of Europe. It's the root source of all folk styles in Ireland, the British Isles and also Brittany in NW France and Galicia in NW Spain. Ancient, vibrant, emotional and expressive - from emotional balladry to kicking dance music - Celtic music is very much alive and well in modern music."
The CD is subtitles "Vol 1. Ballads, Airs & Laments", a second volume of "jigs, reels, polkas and Celtic multisamples" is promised as coming soon. The collection comes in two halves, firstly a "construction kit", where you get the full mix of a track, and then the individual components in isolation and then a secondly a whole range of riffs and sounds from Celtic instruments are presented.
The collection is a 3CD audio set for the price of a regular sample CD, which is pretty good value for money as in all you get over 220 minutes of audio. It's not quite as good as that may seem on the surface, as I'll explain later on, but at least AMG are to be given a pat on the back for not charging extra. The first CD contains a small CD-ROM section with the licence information and a few Adobe Acrobat flyers.
The CD has been produced by half a dozen "Minstrals", Luke Daniels, Paul James, Simon Mayer, Julie Murphy, Andy Taylor & Brian Willcocks, all of whom seem fairly "up" in the Celtic music world, having a whole string of appearances at famous venues and albums behind them. If your like me and have no knowledge of Celtic music beyond "The Corrs" (apologies to fans of real Celtic music ;-)), then you can take it as read that they know what they're doing.
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The documentation is excellent, each collection of tracks is numbered, named with a descriptive title, there are BPM's listed along with the stereo/mono information, and where appropriate the pitch information is given too. Additionally for half a dozen of the instruments there is a paragraph or two about it, which is interesting if you've little idea about a Uillean Pipe or Bodhran.
On the CD-ROM section there are a couple of licence documents in Adobe pdf format. The licence agreement requires positive licence registration for any kind of commercial use. It's no major deal, just requires a signed form to be sent off to AMG and they'll issue you with a unique user number. (There is a space on the CD for you to write it on). Additionally AMG require a non-specific credit, a logo, notification of release and a copy of the work. It's a tightening up of the licence requirements, which in turn should help the artists and AMG, and in turn act as an anti piracy measure.
Track 82 of CD 1 is a test tone at digital level maximum, whilst there is no specific demo track, the complete mixes are tracks in their own right and could be considered as such.
