Tuesday, December 15, 2020, 19:34. This project was actually created 9/2/2020 as one of my selections for my applied piano class and I have been working on it for the past 4 ½ months. Today I recorded it to submit as one of my final pieces for the semester. From a performance standpoint the recording clearly won’t win any awards but it is completely memorized and, except for a number of slight hesitations, memory slips, and a scattering of wrong notes, it was played through completely from memory at a rather slow rate (around ¼ note = 20). With another four to six weeks of consistent practice I could probably have it secure and possibly up to a reasonable speed. The primary objective Dr. Thomas has been wanting me to focus on is to be able to play at a consistent speed with no errors or hesitations. I can’t say that I’m there yet as is evident in the recording but I have been doing better at it. (see https://youtu.be/g7MxvsJbDsU)
I used the requirement to produce this video recording as motivation to take advantage of my recording environment and do a little experimentation with microphones, their placement, and the routing through the various equipment in the studio. This is detailed more in p0394_OBS-Reaper-ConfigurationTest. The quick summary is that I used 4 microphones to record the piece on separate channels in Reaper which was supposed to send them via ReaStream to 4 separate audio tracks in OBS studio but the audio configuration in OBS would not work the way it was supposed to. Somehow I only got a stereo track and one of the sends just ‘disappeared’. The audio on the .mkv from OBS was horrible so I ended up taking the Reaper audio files and synced them up to the video in Premiere Pro as the quality was much better resulting in the file I ultimately will be uploading to YouTube for the assignment. What was most frustrating about this process was that I had completed what I though was a better performance and when I checked that video not only did it fail to record the sound but the camera was not positioned for the viewer to see the keys so I had to do it yet again.