No, I don’t play the piano…
…anymore, that is.
I took lessons for a while. In high school, I started out with keyboards, not guitar. It wasn’t until midway through my first year of college that I first picked up the guitar, which means that I have now been playing it for almost exactly 15 years.
While playing guitar, though, I did actually spend a semester taking piano. I did OK, I suppose, but I struggled in some ways. My hands aren’t very big — could barely reach a full octave with one hand. I have a childhood injury that left my right hand pinky and half of my ring finger numb, and the pinky in particular is lacking in agility.
I also took music theory and composition classes, which were heavily driven by the piano. And that’s where this came from.
I found this piece digging through old sheet music I had stacked up, saved fom that composition class. Looks like it was once intended to be a full string quartet sonata. It isn’t anymore, though the name has stuck. I grabbed it and rearranged it for piano, and wrote a new little bit in the middle to break up the fact that the actual full-length sonata completely ran out of steam and ideas. Now it’s just a little bit of vaguely classical incidental music.
I used it as the soundtrack on one of the puzzle games I wrote last year. But since nobody has the puzzle game, nobody could hear it. So here it is.
Technical musiciany details: this is actually a recording of the MIDI played through a somewhat decent piano soundfont. The fact that I have a somewhat decent piano soundfont and not any decent soundfonts for anything else is why it turned into a piano piece. 🙂
8 Responses to “No, I don’t play the piano…”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
While I’ve been composing things off and on since I was about seven, my problem with composition is that I invariably end up producing a completely different piece from what I set out to create. I mean, really drastically, too. I’ll start planning to compose a rock piece, and end up with a pipe organ toccata. I always wished I could take a composition course, maybe so I’d be less of a wild dabbler, but, bah, when did I ever stop being a wild dabbler at anything?
I don’t play piano at all, but I wish sometimes that I did. Unfortunately, the only way I have to present most of my compositions is MIDI, and, well, unless you have some good soundfonts, and manage to work a bit of expression into your MIDI-transcription, MIDI can really sound like crap. My mother always compared MIDI to mechanical music box music, and I think it was a good comparison. I’m still on a hunt for the One True Notation-to-MIDI package that won’t cost $1000, and which understands concepts like “Rallentando,” and “Allegro non troppo,” but I think I’m going to have to code it my own damn self.
Unfortunately, all I have to listen to your track here is my ratty headphones at work, but it sounds as though, with its current setting, your sonata has turned into a perfectly viable late baroque piano prelude.
I use Sibelius. It’s a music notation package that does in fact understand stuff like “allegro non troppo” and much more besides; it also can play stuff in a variety of styles (e.g., tell it to play something with light swing, and it will). When the score is exported to MIDI, it preserves all the dynamics.
I like it particularly because I can notate something in guitar tablature — even weirdo tunings like I use — and it will translate it back into notation for me.
The piano soundfont is a freeware one; I would have to dig it up, but if you have a soundcard that supports soundfonts, there’s quite a lot of them out there that are freely available.
I never quite felt comfortable in composition class. I was writing a lot on the guitar, and somehow felt that stuff wasn’t suitable for the class. So then I struggled to try to compose via notation, particularly in the more classical styles, when that wasn’t really where my eventual muse lay.
When I was taking piano, the pieces I had to learn were all these very rigid, non-syncopated things — beginner stuff. Then for my jury piece, the teacher said “OK, this will be the toughest for you, especially given your weak left hand…” It was a boogie-woogie thing, lots of syncopation, and I had it nailed in no time. She was quite taken aback, but it was clear then to me that it was the sort of music I was trying to learn that was the problem.
My grandfather played piano obsessively, but he passed away a month after I was born. My family inherited his piano. I was supposed to have lessons, but my parents never arranged them, so I took up the clarinet, instead, because we had one in the house, and I could play it in school. Then, inexplicably, my parents arranged piano lessons for my younger sister, instead. Ah well. I could plunk out a few things, but not well.
I later switched to bass clarinet. It’s amazing how one instrument can suit you so much better than another. I was a terrible clarinetist, but bass clarinet was like swimming in cool clear water on a hot day. It was natural for me in every way that the clarinet wasn’t.
It looks like Sibelius is a little out of my price range, at the moment, but I’ll definitely tuck it away on my rainy day wishlist. It sounds much closer to what I want than many of the other things I’ve used.
I am big fan of Finale, although I must admit I haven’t played around with the MIDI elements enough to comment on them. I don’t know the price on Sibelius, but Finale isn’t exactly dirt cheap either … in the $200 range I believe (maybe more – I can’t remember).
I grew up with a piano in our house and developed a very good ear for music just by goofing around on it. In grade school we were offered music lessons (by the school) on the instrument of our choice. I chose trumpet, sax, clarinet, drums, guitar, and triangle. They stuck me with trombone, which was the one instrument on my “absolutely not” list (I don’t know, I just always hated that instrument). By the time high school came around I was ready to quit the trombone and focus on sports. My parents encouraged me to just hang on for one semester, as though the experience would be any less miserable than in grade school.
Long story short, I studied performance in college (as well as commercial composition) and have continued to play until this day.
The moral? You CAN’T quit the trombone.
Actually, Kristen pretty much quit the trombone. 🙂
I bought mine from a pawn shop (was a second/third instrument for me… primary was flute/piccolo). I’ve always wanted to hang mine upside down on a wall and turn it into a planter. =)
Lucky you! I guess my trombone is like that weird uncle you HAVE to love … (which is even more difficult if that weird uncle also played trombone). When I was a senior in HS (or maybe a freshman at college) I started writing a book called “Everything you NEVER wanted to know about: The Trombone”. It was amusing in an 18/19-yr-old way … I’d like to think of it as the brilliant predecessor of the “Dummies” series of books.
(fwiw, chabuhi == Chip)
If you’re looking for a tool that’s more “play around and jot stuff down” oriented, you might want to consider Cakewalk. I believe it’s cheaper than either Sibelius or Finale, but it’s not primarily a notation program.