{"id":29200,"date":"2019-03-06T07:44:24","date_gmt":"2019-03-05T23:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=29200"},"modified":"2019-03-06T14:49:56","modified_gmt":"2019-03-06T06:49:56","slug":"home-recording-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2019\/03\/06\/home-recording-part-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Home Recording \u2013 Part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ling mused the other day whether we should get Peter started on a music instrument, like his older sister. Apparently, the same question was asked by Hannah’s piano teacher, who actually resides at The Minton too. The wife wanted to have Peter learn the violin however – not my favorite instrument. And that’s because there would just be too much competition for practice time on our Yamaha upright if Peter learns the piano haha.<\/p>\n

Truth to tell, I’ve been spending more time on our family piano than I thought I would when we bought it used 2.5 years ago. Though I usually play only on the weekends, but it’s anywhere between 2 to 3 hours each time: probably almost enough to have my neighbors banging on my table begging me to stop. Though it was nice to run into a neighbor upstairs in the lift who asked who was the person who had been playing the piano in our apartment, and that the music was beautiful. A momentary Horn and Toot and hao-lian-ness there LOL.<\/p>\n

In any case, I last recorded at home almost 1.5 years ago<\/a> a small number of pieces using equipment I’d ordered off Amazon. But the entire recording and post-processing experience then was just tedious and seriously off-putting, and the effort that went into producing a single piece – including editing and merging of video and audio channels in Adobe Premiere – was simply not commensurate against the fairly poor audio quality in the recording itself. I wanted something simpler to setup and also turn-around into a video output format that I could post quickly.<\/p>\n

So, last Friday afternoon, I used the most quick and dirty recording possible – recording using a smartphone mounted on a tripod – and nothing else. The Samsung Note 9 did recording duties for the just over 3 hours of playing, and the outcome of that exercise was about 40 recorded pieces – of which 18 are semi-decent enough for keeping. The footage was recorded in 4K 60fps, and the Note 9 could barely keep up – with its 5 minute maximum recording time with those recording parameters, and that the phone got so hot thermally that the recorder had to auto-shut down. Our living room acoustics remains awful: too much echo, and because of the limited microphone abilities of the Note 9, very little audio channel separation too.<\/p>\n

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Two of Yukie Nishimura’s song books I ordered from Amazon Japan that arrived late last year. Nishimura is a prolific Japanese pianist and composer but relatively unknown outside her country.<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And here’s one of the pieces I recorded: ” \u661f\u304c\u54b2\u3044\u305f\u65e5 “, and written by Yukie Nishimura. Someone who knows Japanese will have to translate that, but I recognize the words ‘ \u661f’ i.e. stars and ‘ \u65e5’ i.e. sun. It’s a lovely song in D Flat. The piece begins like a lullaby with a main theme, and three developmental sub-themes – each alternating between major and minor keys before reaching a crescendo that’s almost toy-march-like. Towards the end of the piece, my finger accidentally smacks against the ledge where the iPad is resting – with a very loud thud. Ouch!<\/p>\n