This was going to be the first part of a longish explanation of my recent musical dabblings that I alluded to earlier, but then I got sidetracked for the last couple of evenings with an experiment which involved recording myself playing on my (recently tuned!) piano, and then got further frustrated with the difficulty of notating the piece I was playing.
So instead, you can listen to me play Chopin. I decided I wasn’t going to completely embarrass myself by attempting to record the Barcarolle without a lot more practice, so here’s the F# Major Prelude, Op. 28 No. 13 (MP3 file, 2.7 MB) instead. It’s short, and it’s kind of like the Barcarolle if you squint, and it illustrates all sorts of fun pedalling and voicing issues typical of Chopin. I think I even managed to get this into an enclosure in the RSS 2.0 feed. (Sorry, no luck for RSS 1.0 readers. I can’t grok this.)
As for the setup, this was recorded in my basement, using the internal microphone of my Macintosh G4 laptop running Sound Recorder, exported to a WAV file using QuickTime Player, trimmed down on my Windows machine using WavePad, and converted to a MP3 file on my Linux box using LAME. Three operating systems, three computers. Sadly, this was the easiest way for me to get things done. You can see why I’m getting a little frustrated with computers and audio software in general.
Another reason I picked this prelude is because it’s short, but packed with enough complicated notation to stress music notation software, which is what I’ve been spending a lot of free time playing with lately. So far attempts to fully represent this piece have been failing in various ways. More on this topic in the future.
Drop me a line if you’d like to see this sort of thing continue. I need all the incentive I can get to practice!
