Piano-music.org

I haven’t been blogging much the past few weeks, which should change in the next couple months. A quick note on the tuning – I checked it today and the grand seems to be holding tune okay. I think it has a lot to do with mic placement, which should be resolved since I took more time to work on this today, and I believe I’ve found the right spot.

Sorry I’m a day late in getting the podcast posted this week. Yoko, SanBan, and I spent the entire day out visiting family in the Houston area on Saturday. This week I tried a different mic placement and I’m not sure if it came out as well as I thought it would. Plus, I think the piano is finally slipping a little out of tune. I’m going to try to get it tuned either this week or next. The songs I kind of used this week are: “When All is Said and Done”, and “How He Loves”.

As promised, I played around a little with mic placement and believe I found a good spot. I actually used 4 songs for the first time. They are: I Can Only Imagine, From The Inside Out, Who am I, and Amazed. I really enjoyed playing this week. I normally have the lid of the grand piano closed, but I had it wide open this time, and the sound was wonderful.

I’ve made it 10 weeks straight! That’s something to celebrate! Sorry this week’s podcast got posted a little later than usual. Thursday was Yoko and my 9th annversary so we’ve been sort of celebrating over the past few days. The R-09HR seems to be picking up certain frequencies more so than the R-09 when I have it positioned on the piano music stand. I’m not sure what’s causing this – could just be the difference in the internal mics. I did EQ a bit so the end result isn’t too shabby. Next week I hope to spend some time finding the “sweet spot” for the R-09HR so hopefully Week 11 will sound better. Also, I think the cooler weather is starting to affect my piano. The lower register is beginning to sound out of tune. What do you think? It was tuned March of this year and I normally can go a year between tunings, but I figured this would probably change once I started this blog. I’ll see about having the tuner over sometime in October after we get

The R-09HR still seems to be picking up a great deal of background noise. I’m not sure what the cause of this is, but I apologize in advance if it bothers you. I still need to play around with the sample rate and limiter functions. I hope to get to this before next week’s podcast. Also, from here out I’ll wait till after 9:00 or 10:00 PM to record since mornings and afternoons end up being too noisy. Take care!

The first recording ended up being a mess for some reason. I figured it was a bug with the limiter so I upgraded the firmware on the new R-09HR and turned the limiter off. I recorded another 30 minutes which ended up being a mess as well due to all of the settings being restored to factory defaults. The third recording went okay, but I don’t think it sounds like it should partly because of all the background noise. At one point you can hear my iPhone get a text and it was upstairs in the theater room. When it went off, it sounded like it was sitting next to the recorder. I guess I still have some learning to do with this new recorder, but I made some good progress the past couple of days. Also, I think my piano is starting to get out of tune which doesn’t help matters any.

I tried to incorporate more of the requests from a while back, but things didn’t really work out as I had planned. I did play a “Ron” version of “Somebody” which Micah requested, but didn’t really get to any of the others. In fact, the request fulfillment process for me has been kind of a distraction so I’ll probably stick to playing what comes to heart from here out. I did also play “We Fall Down” and “Amazing Grace” – the Chris Tomlin version.

I finally got to the song suggestions. Sorry it took so long. The songs are “El Shaddai” and “You Raise Me Up”. It was fun working these two songs into this week’s podcast. Thank you Micah and Cindy for your suggestions – I will try to use the other songs you mentioned in future podcasts.

This was another full week for me so I didn’t get to incorporate last week’s requests in this week’s podcast. I feel that the past two weeks may have suffered a little bit due to my crazy schedule. Studying for the CISSP has consumed every ounce of free time I’ve had the past week or so. My test is in less than 48 hours and I still have a ways to go on my study. I wasn’t going to let this exam keep me from doing a podcast though. The tempo is a little faster than what I normally play which somewhat reflects what’s been happening in my life lately. I hope you enjoy it – if not, there’s the other podcasts and the old album Till next week!

I wasn’t able to incorporate any of the song suggestions from last week – I am very sorry. This week was one of the busiest for me so far this year. So much stuff is going on right now in my life. Lots of really big changes potentially. I’ll have to blog about it sometime after the dust has settled. Well, I didn’t really have time to select any songs to play.