Getting the most from this great hobby!
I first came across this book in the pages of Pianist Magazine (of which I’m a subscriber). The author, Alan Rusbridger, relates his story of tackling Chopin’s 1st Ballade in a year culminating in performing it to an audience. I bought the Kindle Edition from Amazon and read it during a Christmas Holiday in Bali. ...
"Review: Play It Again: An Amateur Against The Impossible"Continue reading
When interpreting a piece of music, there are a number of ways to add interest to it and one of these is something I’ve noticed lots of professional pianists use – I call it Inner Voices. That is to say things that seem to be written as part of the harmony or the bass which...
"Add colour to your Piano playing with Inner Voices"Continue reading
This piece appeared in Pianist Magazine Issue 94. More popularly recognized as a cello solo (with piano accompaniment) famed as the music to the ‘Dying Swan’, this arrangement by Silotti is beautiful by its elegance and simplicity. Here, I’m using the term simplicity in its relative sense. If you take transcriptions by composers such as...
"Learning The Swan for Solo Piano, arranged by Siloti"Continue reading
I went Scuba Diving this weekend … very relaxing and prompted me to write this post based on a theory I developed a little while ago. As I’ve said before, I developed terrible problems with tension in my playing once I reached Grade 8. This probably caused me to abandon the piano in my early...
"Is there a similarity between playing the Piano and Scuba Diving?"Continue reading
How things have changed … Since those many years ago when I first played Piano, we have seen massive changes in technology which now make things either much easier than they were before or, for the first time, actually make them possible. If you’re not really a fan of technology, please, just bear with me...
"Technology and the piano …"Continue reading
It has been almost 2 years since I first set up this blog (April, 2016) … intending to add to it regularly. I have to admit that I have been somewhat sporadic in my additions (just 12 posts in 2 years), but I will try to do better! Blog wise, I’ve branched out into a...
I was watching an interview of a young Martha Argerich on YouTube some time ago. She made the remark “je ne fais pas de gammes” – I don’t do scales. So many scales and so little time All pianists will have memories of learning all of their scales, Major, Harmonic Minor, Melodic Minor, Chromatic in...
"Should I practice scales on the piano?"Continue reading
So far, I’ve described how I decided what equipment I needed and which DAW and Virtual Instruments I’d use. Now it is time to actually play each instrument part into the computer. This, in itself, isn’t so hard (or so I thought) – playing one instrument at a time on a keyboard should be child’s...
"How to Record the Orchestra"Continue reading
A Symphony Orchestra is a significant body of musicians. For the String Section alone there could be as many as 60 musicians (16 first violins, 14 second violins, 12 violas, 10 cellos and 8 double basses). Then you have all the additional instruments (such Woodwind, Brass and Percussion) – a full stage. For my project,...
We’re all fairly familiar with the interior of a Recording Studio, if only from seeing music videos over the years where the recording process is often featured. Image By Rebecca Wilson – originally posted to Flickr as Vicariously, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11992757 Whilst we recognise the image , the majority of us of course haven’t...
"What is a Digital Audio Workstation (or DAW)"Continue reading