Audio

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melsenspianolog:

I recently purchased a Zoom iQ6 X-Y Stereo Microphone for iOS from Guitar Center, and this is the first recording I made with it. I have been making all my recordings on my iPhone, but the recording quality hasn’t been great for music. I’m still working out the best settings to use, but I think you’ll notice the difference!

I just adjusted the levels on this recording – it turned out louder than I expected the first time. Sorry if you tried to listen to this and were put off by how much noise there was! It should work better now…

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2-26-14

I’m going to try to get back in the swing of things after a long break from recordings. That street piano project was intense! Tonight, I recorded from my keyboard with GarageBand. It’s a completely different sound from the raw street recordings – absolutely no background noise at all!

This piano log is influenced by the concert I gave recently with some friends where we played soul, pop, and show tunes. I did a lot of playing from chord tabs, which is a relatively new thing for me. The underlying structure is very straight-forward, but you have to play around with your voicing and melodic lines to make it interesting!

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10-5-2013 – Chinatown Gate – Piano #30

A souvenir of the street piano project! There were some pieces/songs that seemed to be favorites for many of the people who sat down to play these pianos, and “Doe, a deer” was one of them! Others I can remember were definitely “Piano Man” by Billy Joel, “Fur Elise” by Beethoven, and, of course, “Heart and Soul.”

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10-5-2013 – South Station – Piano #29

There were two pianos set up here, but I only played the taller one in the foreground. The lady in green had been there all day, and she was asking visitors to sign a petition to keep the pianos. I signed it, though I didn’t know what the plan was for them when they were to be removed. I know this was a public art project, and I realize that the pianos would not have stayed in good condition (and of course, for some of them, their condition wasn’t very good to begin with!) if they had been left out much longer, but I wonder….What has become of them?

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10-5-2013 – Norman Leventhal Park – Piano #28

I think there might have been some wedding portraits happening at the other end of this park as I was playing! This piano was unoccupied when I got there, and the park was relatively empty of people in that corner, so I ended up playing for a while. This is just a sample of it…