Piano

For Christmas I bought a Yamaha Clavinova CLP digital piano from Jordan Kitt’s Music in College Park, MD. It is not the sexiest digital piano ever conceived but it has 88 gravity-weighted touch-sensitive keys, an excellent fully sampled grand piano sound and, most importantly, a headphone jack for silent playing. And while it doesn’t hold up to an actual grand, it feels much better than a plastic synthesizer with spring-loaded keys.

Mostly I bought the piano for Katie because I have this idea in my head that Katie’s life will be much richer if she has music hardwired in her brain. But I decided, what the hell, I would learn how to play, too, simply from constant practice and staring at the little numbers on the sheet music for hints where to put my hands.

I can read music (treble and bass clef) fine. I have a head full of music theory. I understand how music is built. I don’t need books and videos full of “this is middle C.” I need to just play — scales, hand strengthening exercises, easy to intermediate pieces. Scale runs up and down the keyboard with my left hand. I bought a book full of technique (keep the thumb in, how to go up and down scales in 3-4-3 formation, wrists up, proper posture, how to stretch with thumb or pinky for the leap) and another book full of “Early Intermediate Songs” (better known as lead and bass part together) and went to town.

The first month was constant pain for my left hand which wasn’t used to my pinky having to move anywhere — it has had no feeling for 15 years due to arthritis. Month #2 wasn’t too much better. But I’ve noticed that the playing has become smoother — muscle memory is starting to kick in. Things are easing up.

I suck horribly. I won’t remove the headphones to force people to listen to me work through Bach’s Minuet in G Minor with pain. But it all does seem to be, at day’s end, about muscle memory and endless practice if one already has a head full of theory. My muscles are starting to remember. That is the baseline: for your hands to figure out consistently where the A key is without having to look or hunt-and-peck, it’s two months of practice, minimum 30 minutes/day.

Meanwhile, Katie is having faster and faster recognition of what notes go with what keys and what fingers to press what keys when it says so she is already making progress. She is starting to figure out that practice == getting better == playing more awesome little songs.

Oh! I can recommend the clavinova for anyone who has limited space and/or resources but still wants a piano that plays like a real one. I am jonsing to plug it into my Macbook through its MIDI interface and see what sort of havoc I can enact. I need cables, though.

Snowmageddon 3: The REVENGE

My only hope is that the third movie in a series is never very good, so maybe Snowmageddon 3: the REVENGE will be nothing.  But the predictions have gone from “a dusting” to “2-4 inches” to “4-8 inches” to “10-20 inches” to basic flat-out panic this morning on WAMU. FOX Baltimore is running around the clock weather coverage for all us shut-ins. My worry is about the roads — even though we got one good day of sun yesterday — hadn’t completely melted and now they will refreeze into compacted ice with a layer of ice, sleet, and snow.

Katie’s school was open with discretion to parents. Since it is in the neighborhood — no major or minor roads, just subdivision roads — she went so she could get some running around time because the beans were piling up. But Eric will get her early before it gets really bad.

I will take more pictures and post them. But it looks like the UP outside.

The Snow Canyon and Snowmageddon 3: The Revenge

Snow Canyon

One Thousand Milli-Em

This is a not-terrible shot down the private drive my house and two others sit on. The Howard County Plow Guy ™ was kind enough to plow down our private drive even though it’s technically not his job to do so. He took pity on us. Otherwise we would be burrowing out like gophers through the snow still. Even so, these piles of snow are over five feet tall. They don’t look five feet tall so I took a comparison picture and used myself (5′1″) as a comparison measurement.

So the Weather Guy on the Weather Channel has upgraded Snowmageddon 3: The Revenge from a “weak storm you have nothing to worry about” to “this could tie up roads” to “OH MY GOD POWER LINES TREES ROOFS DEATH DOOM THE END OF TIME.” It went from 2-4″ to 4-8″ to 8-12″ to 10-20″ to “it’s going to be inches of snow so you better deal with it.”

And we’re out of eggs. We are not yet eating the components of food.

Once More, With Feeling

I give up. I am going to a purely minimalistic theme. Checking to see if RSS works with this.

Testing for RSS

I am getting some reports that the spiffy theme I loved was totally messing with my RSS feed. Checking to see if that is true.

Gym

Now I understand why people with what I am going to graciously call “hereditary or otherwise non-avoidable sugar issues” (heh) turn into insane gym rats. I do not feel well unless I go and do some pretty vigorous exercise for at least 30 minutes. Otherwise I feel sluggish and sick and edgy. But with exercise, huzzah!

I finally made a compromise with myself to give up the weights and focus on just getting my heart rate into a nice warm spot for 30 minutes, so my poison is currently the stand bike. It lets me a) read and b) pedal which is all I really want. So far the arthritis isn’t firing too bad which is my main concern. I don’t seem to be losing any weight either, but I have given up on that front. If I lose weight, yay. If I don’t, yay. All I care about is feeling okay and getting books read, so this seems to get me there.

“The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music”

I found this book today. The website is very plain and the information is a bit obtuse, but it is a complete 337 page book on everything you ever wanted to know about sound design and sound synthesis, although it is extremely EE/Math oriented:

The Theory and Technique of Electric Music by Miller Puckette.

If this looks (even vaguely) interesting, hop on over to Cycling74’s site. They’re the people who make SoundFlower and a whole bunch of other experimental music tools. Unfortunately, Max/MSP is stupid expensive.

Math + Computers = Music!

Prepping for Movie Score Work

Here are my notes on prepping for movie work for future reference and provided for the edification of anyone who might care.

Read the rest of this entry »

Synth Demo #2

Tonight, I spent an hour and change staring at little bars in an output window and comparing the bars to my frequency ranges chart and making changes — moving notes up and down octaves, tweaking compression, and adding in a little bit of low-pass and high-pass filter action. I also changed the synth voice so that it has this “flowing desert feel” and had it match the beat of the LFO to 1/2 beat.

The hats are mixed up way too high in the mix, but otherwise it sounds pretty decent now.

My second demo is here: Zebra2 Test #2.

Synth/Trance Demo

I am starting to work on the sounds to score a movie project, which is now sitting on the top of my project pile. I am fulling intending to use u-he’s utterly magnificent synth Zebra 2.1 for the main melodic trance lead and ambient pads. I don’t actually have Zebra 2.1, but I have the version of Zebra that came with this month’s Computer Music. While it isn’t as good it does make the same general sounds with the same general tools.

I put together a 49 bar demo tonight to show off what Zebra sounds like, which you can listen to here. It is really, really, really impressive. The demo has a few issues — there’s a little blurble at the beginning of the bar and there’s a little bit of frequency muddle at 200Hz. I am also trying to ween myself off EQ entirely and live on low-pass filters, gates, limiters and compression.

Anywho, in case you missed it in the blurble:

Demo: Zebra Test
135 BPM, Key of C
Uses Logic, the ES2 synth, Ultrabeat and ZebraCM.