Ali Handal: Music & Video

Andrew introduced me to the iPhone application "Ocarina" a few weeks ago, but it wasn't until we were at a rehearsal for a Christmas show a few days ago that I pulled it out and discovered an easy way to play the melody from "Carol of the Bells." Unfortunately, when I transposed the song to the correct key to play the whole melody on the iPhone Ocarina, the riff was much more difficult to play!

So I came up with the duet arrangement for the iPhone, Andrew tweaked it, and we took to memorizing the piece the day before our performance. Once memorizing the fingerings, we had to practice the song over and over and over again to get the performance as "clean" as possible (iPhone Ocarina players will know what I'm talking about here). If you don't get the timing of your breath and your finger movements absolutely synchronized, you produce weird popping noises and extra notes between your intended melody.

We have a lot of fun playing the Ocarina together, and we plan on arranging and performing more Ocarina duets in the future. Feel free to suggest future songs to us at: ali@alihandal.com

And if you want to download this application for your iPhone, I highly recommend it. It only costs 99 cents, and it's really fun to learn!