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diff --git a/lyrics/lumber-over.txt b/lyrics/lumber-over.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e4be507 --- /dev/null +++ b/lyrics/lumber-over.txt @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +I spent a long while forgetting about music. A Good 13½ months. +I was in a voice chat yesterday with a good friend, +who asked me when I would be making music again. +He reminded me how sad it would be to have played my last song. +And so I decided to play again. + +I dedicated the rest of my day to making music again. +I left the chat and spent some time tinkering at the electric piano. +I mostly just warmed up, rather than getting anything good. +I found that I had a new confidence. +Since the last time I had attempted to make music, +I had become comfortable and confident, in a general sense. +I realized a few things: +* I need to have something to say. + What good is a mode of expression with nothing worth expressing? +* I had become dexterous enough to use two hands at once. + I can thank the tax office for that. +* I had to stop trying to play piano and to start trying to make good music. +* The electric piano has two ports for 3.5mm headphone jacks. +I took a good nap. I woke up in the late afternoon, +and watched the third Harry Potter with my sister, +then watched a surprisingly good movie on Netflix with my mother, +called “First Knight”. +It was then a little past midnight. +I sat at the electric piano in our living room with headphones plugged in, +and did a little more fiddling. I realized one more thing: +* I really don't work well with verbatim instructions such as sheet music. + Instead of writing which notes I should play, + I may write what tone and what kind of progression I want. +So, I grabbed a pen and paper from my room, and as I fiddled, +wrote what kind of song I wanted, in vague terms. +It's not entirely coherent, but here it is: + +The first revision: + +Fast and rapid, but light. +This is where the piano excels. +Move from C minor to F minor [I'm pretty sure I got the scales wrong. +C'est la vie.]. +Lumber around a bit first. +Move to intermediate pace in your own time. + +Second revision: + +Lumber near C3 first in C minor. +Navigate an octave up. Let the pitch carry the acceleration. +Move to F minor [in retrospect, I'm certain that this wasn't F minor. +I realized this before the final recording, but went with it anyway.]. +In C5, dance. +Return to C minor. + +During the recording, I was remembering loneliness, then friendship, +then losing a friend. +On a technical level, the recording involved me connecting to the piano +via a MIDI to USB Type A cable, and using ALSA's `arecordmidi`. +I cropped the failed starts from the MIDI using `lmms`. +From there, I rendered to FLAC via `fluidsynth`, using the Yamaha C5 +Grand Piano soundfont provided here: +https://sites.google.com/site/soundfonts4u/. +I then encoded to 320kbps MP3 via `ffmpeg`. + +Thanks for asking, Alice. |