February 18, 2004

Piano Practice

Posted by Scott at 06:10 AM

Clavinova - For the past several months I've been trying to reacquaint my fingers with piano playing. While I can type at a good clip, my hand eye coordination on the piano has no counterpart. Piano playing is not like riding a bicycle. It doesn't just "all come back to you". Nevertheless it's still been a fun challenge.

My recent numbers have been:

  • Bach's Das Wohltemperierte Klavier - This was my first 'real' two handed piece because there are no chords and the music alternates between the left and right hand with a good deal of repetition.
  • Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture - This has some chords and a bit of left hand work. I find it amazing how playing notes on the left and right hands simultaneously really trips me up now - perhaps because you never do that when typing?
  • Bach's Ave Maria - Perhaps some day I'll be able to play it at my own children's wedddings (grin). Not too many chords and only a little simultaneous left hand, right hand playing.

I've also played the following simple numbers that my kids like:

My daughters like to play that last one because it's all extremely simple. Daniel loves hearing Mission Impossible! He runs over to the piano and starts shouting "dah dah dah dah dah dah" with the rhythm. There are a number of other little numbers like these that I occasionally dabble in, but those are among my kids' favorites.

All of these sound files are just small MIDI files and tend to sound a bit unrealistic when played on a typical computer. Some of the instruments/voices are missing on most computers. Most computers don't put as much effort into their MIDI decoders as a Yamaha synthesizer does, but it gives you a feel for what we're playing over here.

Update: Yes, I just tried this on a PC and Windows Media Player seems to think the files are corrupted somehow. I'm investigating as to why. If your PC plays them with QuickTime's MIDI decoder, things are fine. But if Windows Media Player is your default application for handling MIDI files, chances are it will complain. Is nothing simple?! Argh!

Update 2 : Further investigation showed that it's something very subtle. If you right click on the links and save them to your Desktop, you should be able to play them as standalone files. The so called "corruption" reported by Windows Media Player is related to its efforts to stream the files itself from the server. Weird! If it plays the downloaded file from your hard disk, it seems to handle it without a problem.

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