… over the last two days and I now have sixteen tracks completed for a total of about forty minutes actual CD time. As may be gleaned from this, a fair number of these tracks are fairly short, but nonetheless a number were very tricky sound-wise and I had to do a number of takes before I really got the sound I wanted. That simply means, of course, that I wasn’t good enough to do them properly first time around.
At least I got some good practice in.
Now comes the more difficult part – longer and more complex pieces that I know at this stage I am not good enough to play properly yet, and will require a fair amount of learning/relearning in order to get the confidence that I can do them properly.
This morning, no matter how I tried, I couldn’t make any headway. My fingers were too wooden, and it didn’t help that the pressure of recording added to the overall feeling of mechanicity. A good lunch helped, and by the time I resumed my travails in the afternoon for some reason things started to flow and results improved accordingly – four good tracks were the result.
Once again, I am not applying any equalisation or limitations on the sound of the piano. The only thing I am doing is noise reduction, since there is a bit of a hum which I suspect is intrinsic to the equipment somewhere (I can’t identify where). I’ve compared raw and processed files accordingly (burning CDs of 192Khz MP3s) and to my ear (and also to a spectral analysis of the results) there is no difference in the piano sounds between the two files, which is a relief.
I’m listening to the tracks now through a set of Bose computer speakers (two speakers plus a bass woofer) and the sound is of a very high quality.
This just shows what can be done if one has the right (= cost-effective) equipment. This of course includes the piano…