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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.
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