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.