Piano Secrets Masterclass for Pi Day 2022
Another video already? Yes. I thought it'd take longer, because the footage I captured felt like a mess and I thought I'd have to start over, maybe with a proper script. But once I got into the editing groove it only took a couple days to wrangle the footage into something that works.
Or at least I hope it works, for its intended audience, which is pianists and the piano curious. And I'll be curious to hear if people are interested in this kind of video, though I'll probably try to do more like it either way because I enjoyed leaning into the more technical musician side of me for a video, and I have a lot of piano compositions in my backlog. I hope I'll get better at the format, because I don't usually make videos without a script. Though I did enjoy adding little text snippets to fill in where I didn't mention something out loud at the time.
I've been wanting to try out piano lectures of some sort for the past decade, and I've even attempted to film and edit them in the past. But one of the frustrations is getting the audio to not be 100% terrible, or so out of sync that I'm left with a very frustrating mess of footage and audio that hate each other, not to mention also struggling with the challenges of a new format while also simultaneously being the director, composer, writer, performer, editor, etc etc etc. So in the past I've scrapped everything and given up.
The difference this time is I finally finished upgrading all my equipment, and now it's just a lot easier for me to work with a massive pile of footage, and I have audio that syncs with my camera instead of doing its best to interrupt seven simultaneous workflows at every level of consciousness. If anyone's interested, maybe I'll do an update about my current setup sometime. I like to think next time the technical part will be so much easier that I'll also have enough brainpower left over to make the content a little less chaotic.
I'm not expecting this video to perform well, being a first try in a new format. But since I choose not to have YouTube ads it's not like it loses me anything. Y'all're the only audience that matters. So what else should I do now that I can easily record at the piano?
🐌,
Vi
Comments (16)
Evening! I saw this faaaaaaascinating video about the biases built into the design of piano keyboards: https://youtu.be/ZXlknI-Jc48
How do your hands handle a normal keyboard?
"I know [the digits of pi] and this is what they wanted to do." I once blogged about programming with the theme "The Mind is a Terrible Thing". The idea is to solve problems by turning off the mind and letting the problem drive. When coding, we start not by creating, but by _copying_ the problem into code. When we have difficulties, the problem is telling us it does not like our solution. Not every programmer hears the problem. The smartest do badly here, because they are so smart they do not even experience the difficulty. I liked Einstein's ascribed "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler." Might be a paraphrase. Anyway, it suggests a problem includes within it a solution of quantifiable simplicity. +1 Platonic realm
ps. Every good craftsperson works as hard on their workflow as on the end product. I just made that up. It might not be true.
I like this. Respect for the end product means I'll do anything to have my workflow not get in its way, and crafting a workflow into something that works best for actually working is much harder than working on a workflow that seems optimal in the abstract.
As a music know-nothing I find this to be a fascinating glimpse into the scale of my ignorance. In a good way. +1 on the mic enhancement, and a big shout-out to my buddy in your complimentary close.
I have no musical talent whatsoever, but I do love music and watching someone with talent create something wonderful is fascinating.
Thanks so much for this, this is very nice. It's wonderful to have the deeper context of the decisions made during the composition, and a nice demonstration of someone exploring a piece of music like this in such a detailed way. The only downside is that I now have a strong urge to find all my music teachers from my childhood and demand of them why I was not introduced to this kind of thing many years ago.
Thank you!
Quick note: the overall volume level, and particularly your voice level, seems quite low in this video.
Yeah I was planning to do a voiceover and only use my live voice to remind me what I'm doing. I'll play with the micing next time!
Thank you for your annual Pi day videos. They have become part of what I look forward to every (meteorological) Spring.
Much gratitude for this video. 🙏 I, for one, would be interested in a behind the scenes of your setup once you reach that point. That lovely Bösendorfer no doubt gives you a head start. 😏
She's the best!
I have not yet watched the video (fitting it in later today) but, with your new easily-recordable powers, would you take requests? I happen to have sheet music for a song that was pretty prominent earlier in my life, which you maybe haven't heard if you weren't a Dark Dark Dark fan, and I'd be curious to see your from-the-sheet interpretation? and maybe noodling around on it? I know that like the map isn't the terrain, the notation's not the music, but I can get excited by interpretation. or excited just by experiencing secondhand joy of someone doing cool things that they're good at.
I second the motion for "Vi explores this piece of music" content. I don't have requests, but something that caught your (Vi's) ear, maybe including why it did so, would be very cool IMO.