… give or take a few days, and so it’s a good time to take stock of what’s been happening since my last post.
Nothing much, really …
My eye is progressing well and got a clean bill of health (again!) from my surgeon last week. My musical instruments are sounding good, my playing is improving and I like playing with my iPhone. I’ve tried making VoIP calls through the iPhone via Fring and Skype, but the voice quality is not good at this stage. I’m on a cheap unlimited Australian call plan through Skype, the major benefit of which is I get to talk to Wayne more often without having to pay someone exorbitant costs for it. I can also do conference calls with up to twenty four people. Neat. I spent fifty minutes last night talking to my sister and her daughter. I got the occasional word in edgeways. They always were good at talking – my niece is an extraordinarily good marketing manager – and you need to be able to talk in that line of business.
I’ve been experimenting a bit with various touch techniques on the piano, whether that be by bouncing or stroking the keys, and how much force to use with whichever pedal combination I’m using at the time. Some of the sounds I’m getting from the Tan Dun Watercolours are quite intriguing and having had the opportunity recently to play a couple of other pianos (no names, no court martials) I can’t get anywhere near the sound I can get on the Stuart. One pf the pieces I’m doing with my son at the moment is, of all things, the theme from St Elmo’s Fire by David Foster. I’ve known the piece for a long time of course, and it’s noticeable for a neat use of an electric piano as emphasis in the high registers and also a tenor saxophone solo, once again in the high registers of the instrument giving it a less nasal quality than say playing the same notes on a alto or soprano saxophone. What I found is that those notes meant for the electric piano positively ring out on the Stuart, played in a rather bouncy way that only the Stuart can produce. I’ve tried the same thing on my (now) venerable Ensoniq KS32 keyboard and the results (as may be expected) fall very flat. How I’m going to do it in performance I have no idea – I can’t take the Stuart with me, so I suspect I’m stuck.
Another reason why you can’t beat an acoustic piano.
Another practice session coming up…