the beautiful things in life

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sun Jul 15, 2007 8:37 pm

part 2 in the fashion show series. This part concludes the show, with ballet people dancine with accessories.. but anyway, it's an instrumental piece where I was to do whatever, with an acoustic feel.

I'm really ashamed of my limited piano performance skills (workin' on it!) but ya gotta work with what you have eh? Anyway, it's a full 10 minute piece that actually fits together in terms of themes and motifs.. not too much modulating and all that stuff, but at the very least, the 3 movements are integrated with each other in some form.

I thought I'd just tackle this 10 minute thing with just a 2:30 piano solo, 5:00 minute middle part, and a 2:30 piano solo to end it... and I did, but the 10 minute blank slate business got me trying out all sorts of stuff. This is fun! Feels a lot more free than being confined to song form or the usual 4:00 - 4:30 tracks. And it actually feels like I accomplished something worthwhile.

The emotions that went into this piece comes alot from the things I appreciate about the sea, marine life, tropical life. (If you're wondering about the bossa part, that's the "resort" bit) Which is nice because usually I'm not so much in touch with my emotions in "spew out" rigid form pieces.

I can also see this get linked to cheap elevator music, or muzak style fusion.. dunno, I think it's a shame that instrumentals always get classified that way. It's hard to use traditional instrument based musicality and get away without getting too "smooth jazz"-ish. I'd like to think of this piece as something of higher order. If this piece made you think of beautiful things, then it's completed its purpose.

Grab some coffee, and lend me your ears and mind for just 10 minutes.

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sounds:
intro and outro piano: Yamaha P-250 thourgh SIR convolution (you gotta respect the no edit takes)
middle part: sampletank 2xl and VSL strings that came with kontakt 2 through scope reverbs.

LHong · Post by **LHong** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 11:39 am

Ken,
You have beautiful composition and excellent arranging, I agree in "smooth jazz" kind of tunes, overall. The piano performance is also great even on 96kb streaming MP3! Beware of a few places for the Piano parts; it might get over due of velocity! But I like it and the way it is! The 2nd part has very nice and well-done string's blended too, I'm impressed! If there were an Acoustic-Harp or Acoustic-Percussion for a few phrase's transitions would be nice IMHO!

I enjoyed it very much; I couldn’t believe you did it that well? It is one of best tunes that I have heard from you, Ken! I will listen it a few more times…
Great works!

P/S: BTW, did you just re-upload the MP3 file recently? I was referring to the previous MP3. What were the differences, Ken?

LongStudios

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 12:27 pm

thanks for the positive feedback! The team in Tokyo love it too. I'm excited to see what sort of choreography will go along with this piece.

I re-fiddled with the volumes just a bit, to suite the other fashion show piece better. I also had to re-record the intro piano sequence because there was lots of line noise. (same MIDI sequence, just re-recorded) This one also has more compression on the piano parts since it was way too dynamic. The latest version that's up is a variable bitrate version of the final file that's going to be used in the show.

The velocity is a bit out of control, I wished I had better control. It's pure lack of technique. Only cured with more practice I'm afraid. hehe. It's easy for me to get really punchy even on a real piano. It's just a shame because with these quick productions, there isn't much time for me to learn the piece. Best I can do is "get the idea down". I need to be much more fluent to be able to nail a good performance within days of writing the piece.

But I think learning to play this piece even to this point has been really good practice. The concentration and musicianship required to deliver a convincing solo performance is just crazy. Mine's still wobbly, but hopefully it'll mature a bit with some more practice.

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 1:26 pm

anyone else care to comment? was expecting a little more feedback..

hifiboom · Post by **hifiboom** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 2:49 pm

ken, this sounds fine, and your piano skills are fine too.

the strings sound a bit muffled, like downsampled to 22khz, don`t know what you were using here....

the drums would sound richer too if they were a bit cleaner.

arrangement wise its perfect.

paulrmartin · Post by **paulrmartin** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 6:01 pm

Written while listening:
Debussy, nice... Waltz....Nice touch....Very nice rubato!...Pedal a bit dirty...Drums come in, Definitely got a sound made for the live stage...Bring the piano a bit more in front on top of that pad...Hmmm,,,,a bossa after a waltz... very sexy...with that huffing and puffing, yeah!... Orgasm too short....More timpani please...rework of balance between piano and strings at around 5:00 (friggin' MP3's can't tell much from those...) Yeah, cut the lows on the piano in that section....Your practicing is definitely paying off, Ken.

Nice chords progressions, Ken. Melodically, it's OK if it's made for the stage and you want to keep the audience on the participants. I don't like listening to your music in MP3 form. Too much gets lost in the compression. I'm sure that beautiful reverb has more highs and that the music breathes a lot more in wav format.

You got my respect, Kensama.

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Fri Aug 24, 2007 6:51 am

hifiboom> I'm guessing much of that comes from the fact that I had to encode to mp3 at 96k to fit the filesize restriction. Drums are originally distorted like hell though.

thanks for listening. I'm kind of proud of, and not proud of the piano work. I happy I got some "performance" in there, and also was able to play it and finish it in time. This is the first time where I actually played solo piano that actually sounds somewhat convincing. But it's still kind of inconsistent in some places with some whack touches here and there. (sudden ff samples being triggered) The rubato I really concentrated on, focusing on swells created by breath.

Orgasm too short.. hehe. I think I need to practice staying at a specific level of excitement without backing off too quickly, or building up too much and going overboard. And I think that's precisely called "variation and developing the theme". For now, I'm mostly doing repetitions, and while the main theme is varied and develops throughout the piece, each of the sections don't really do much musical developing (as opposed to building up sonically) within itself.

I tried to keep the melody and the overall movements pretty slow and simple like you say, to keep the focus on the actual performers / models. The relaxed speed of development is kind of soothing.

I think the most important thing is that from all my recent practicing and just sitting in front of the keys put me back in touch with the basics. Harmony, melody, development, variations, big swells, quick swells, etc. Things that carry into all styles. These things get forgotten to some extent when sonic style comes before musical content.

hifiboom · Post by **hifiboom** » Fri Aug 24, 2007 12:10 pm

ken I didnn`t take care of the fact that its mp3, btw the file size restrictions on planetz seems to have been raised also, I think I have uploaded something with 8mb already, while earlier it was 5mb.
great!

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Fri Aug 24, 2007 10:05 pm

no prob, 7mb seems to be the limit, which works fine for normal circumstances. BTW, I really appreciate you all spending 10 minutes listening to the tune. It's not a quick listen, that's for sure.

BingoTheClowno · Post by **BingoTheClowno** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 5:07 pm

hifiboom wrote:ken, this sounds fine, and your piano skills are fine too.

the strings sound a bit muffled, like downsampled to 22khz, don`t know what you were using here....

the drums would sound richer too if they were a bit cleaner.

arrangement wise its perfect.

I agree about the drums, but maybe he just wanted subdued drums.
Very nice.