About my recordings

For Christmas, Mom and Dad got me a Yamaha P-140 digital piano to keep me busy while I'm holed up in my apartment. It's early February, and I've used it easily every day. The Jacobs School is very accommodating of intruders such as myself, but it's not easy to block out time to head over to the practice rooms. So, here we are. The Yamaha has a remarkably authentic grand piano touch, so it's hard to say I miss the grand piano that much.

That takes care of touch, which, really, only I care about. You needn't, unless for some reason it's important to you that I'm happy. The realistic grand piano sound is the work product of some tireless Germans (what isn't?). Akoustik Piano is a software package put out by Native Instruments, which consists of thousands of clips, called samples, of real pianos, miked in all kinds of combinations of arrangements (lid open, lid closed, lid short-sticked, close up, far away, hitting the notes softly, hitting them loudly, etc.). They even tack on the faint sound the keyboard action makes when a key is pressed and depressed, and when the damper pedal is raised and lowered.

When I connect the digital piano to a computer running the software with a MIDI interface, I hear a nine-foot Steinway concert grand, without $100,000 of debt. Really, the final product is akin to cutting and pasting each note and stringing them together.

After recording, the software exports my playing to a WAV file. My personal preference is to compress these to MP3 format, which sound just as good in a substantially smaller size. I keep the WAVs anyway in case I may need to speed them up to impress someone, or perhaps transpose a piece to a different key for a really fun Friday night.

If the download doesn't work, let me know and I'll send you a copy. Also, if you hear any instrument other than a piano, it's not me, and you should probably give it back.