piano notes (september)
Sep. 25th, 2025 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluathe good news: my partner got me a fancy audio interface* for my birthday <3 so i can pull nice recordings off my piano now! and i broke it in by recording myself playing Verso's theme <3 it was very fun <3
the grind:
that recording sounds pretty good (there are a couple errors i'd like to fix, but they're errors of the sort only someone paying close attention would notice, since there's no wrong notes, and imo it's played with overall nice expression/shape/etc), but note that it was the best out of... multiple... runs of the piece... in a controlled environment... which is not exactly the same as having it performance-ready, right! and i'll note that that recording was ~185-190bpm, which sounds fine, i wouldn't be unhappy performing it at that tempo (i actually do genuinely think it sounds a little nicer that way, versus the soundtrack's 210bpm take, given the differences in how a real piano sounds versus the one on the soundtrack**), but it feels a little lame if i'm performing it at that speed because "well i just can't get it any faster," right! i want my choices to be SOLELY because i think they sound nicer :P
my piano teacher observed that i have an occasional tendency to "collapse" my pinky finger when playing—that's the thing where the middle knuckle bends downward, which is bad; you're supposed to be hitting the keys in a more perfectly up-down-vertical way, so that all your weight/energy/control is concentrated at the tip of your finger. and this issue isn't as noticeable when i'm playing easier literature, but, when i'm playing the virtuoso section of "Verso", that wobbly finger has cascading effects—it means i'm less stable/consistent, so even if i don't miss the note, hitting it in that unstable way it puts me subtly out of position in a way that will cause me to fuck up later parts of the run.
which is bad! so she gave me a very simple etude to practice which will hopefully help me focus on Not Doing That & retrain whatever obnoxious default setting i have that keeps wanting to do things the wrong way. (she seemed very anxious when suggesting this etude, as though worried i would find it too boring/tedious, which seemed odd to me. i wonder if she has a lot of students who just Only Want To Play Fun Stuff All The Time & she's used to catering to that mindset? but that is not me haha, i'll play a LOT of boring shit if it will in fact make me sound better; that's the whole reason i got a teacher, because i wasn't playing stuff to my own satisfaction and i couldn't figure out how to get better on my own.though that is a good reminder i should get back into the habit of daily scales/chords/arpeggios in every key huh)
she also suggested, very gently, as if worried about making me sad, that i put "Verso" away for a while i focus on trying to retrain my technique. i was like "lol i'm way ahead of you"—as soon as i got that recording finished (so i could feel emotionally "done" on some level), i started working on something else, because i could tell running the same stuff over and over wasn't really improving my performance very much even though i thought i was trying very hard to play it with better technique—i just kept falling back into bad habits—and i think if i take a 2-4 week break and come back to it fresh, i'll have a better shot of actually rewiring my fingers and hopefully play it a lot better.
so i started working on "Révérence" (the Old Lumiére theme), which is a really nice change of pace so far. it's easier than "Verso" imo, but certainly not trivial, and in the one lesson i've spent working on it with my teacher so far, she pointed out several sections where there's an opportunity to really slow down and focus while practicing because they're bits where i can build up those techniques that i'm working on. and the piece is much slower overall so i'm not worried at all about the "will i ever be able to get this up to tempo" question like i was with "Verso."
i did also get myself a book of Chopin's etudes so i can stare at them aspirationally. they look... even more terrible than expected LOL. i have my eyes on op 10 no 9, which sits at the nice intersection of "one of my favorites" and "one of the easier ones", but when i flipped to that page & piddled around for a few bars i was like... what the fuck... whose idea was that 5-4 fingering in the left hand??? that feels terrible who actually plays it like that??? and then i did some research and, uh, that's the original fingering suggested by Chopin himself, who did not have giant hands, and yeah it's very much by design—you're supposed to accommodate the 5-4 stretch via finger/wrist flexibility or some shit. horrid. anyway yeah i'm probably at least a year (more likely years...) from being able to really entertain any of these, but, it's fun to have them around for piddling now and again, at least~
also, i did have to take a couple days' break because i strained my right index finger + wrist somehow and i was freaked out that i'd injured them or something. at first i wondered if the culprit was Playing That Tricky Section Of "Verso" Over And Over With Shitty Technique—my hand definitely consistently feels sore after i play that piece a lot (my teacher says this won't happen if i learn to play with better technique; i'm tensing up / straining during the hard parts)... but usually it's sore in a way that feels like "lifted a lot of weights", which is uncomfortable but harmless, whereas this soreness was more like "if i fully extend/flex my index finger i get a shooting pain down my finger and into my wrist, especially if i point that finger toward the right, and to a lesser extent pinching stuff between index finger and thumb Just Hurts." it got fully better after two days' rest and in hindsight i think the culprit was Holding Phone Too Much In An Awkward Fashion (that index finger stretch is in fact the way i hold my phone). so, uh, i should keep an eye on that. i mean not that i need another reason to use my phone less. horrid little device; wish i didn't have to have one!
OH ALSO: i do have "Verso" memorized now lmao. i wasn't consciously trying to do that, and had no idea i'd done it, until one day i was at my piano & too lazy to go back downstairs to fetch my sheet music, so i just gave it a shot and... the whole piece came out. convenient! now i can torment people with blorbo music at the literal drop of a hat muahaha <3
* aside: "i have a digital piano; let me record the audio off of it exactly as it sounds" is a bafflingly complex problem to solve???? i can give The Full Saga in the comments to anyone who cares but. tl;dr this was like at least a week and a half of A/V hell lmao. MOSTLY HANDLED BY MY PARTNER, because he's great & that was included in the whole birthday deal, but i was Taking Notes so i could know/handle everything myself eventually and. good god. afterwards i asked a former-professional-sound-engineer friend how he PUTS UP with all this nonsense and he's like "i mean, well, i very much didn't; you'll notice i eventually left that career" lmao
** i'm like 50% certain the song on the soundtrack is actually overlaying multiple digital pianos—the reverb/timbre/etc sounds notably different for some parts, in a way that they wouldn't if it was All Being Played On The Same Piano—so even with perfect technique it's impossible for a human performance of "Verso" to sound identical to the one on the soundtrack. which is disappointing in some ways but also exciting in others—i can't sound like that so i get to pick what i'd like to sound like instead!—and, yeah, i do think playing it a bit downtempo emphasizes the lushness/darkness/mysteriousness of the piece in important ways. i wouldn't want to play it much slower than 185bpm—it needs to be quick to still have that propulsive energy—but playing it So Super Fast is less impressive when all the notes must be pedaled as one & thus the fast section will never found as distinct/stocatto-y as the soundtrack.
the grind:
that recording sounds pretty good (there are a couple errors i'd like to fix, but they're errors of the sort only someone paying close attention would notice, since there's no wrong notes, and imo it's played with overall nice expression/shape/etc), but note that it was the best out of... multiple... runs of the piece... in a controlled environment... which is not exactly the same as having it performance-ready, right! and i'll note that that recording was ~185-190bpm, which sounds fine, i wouldn't be unhappy performing it at that tempo (i actually do genuinely think it sounds a little nicer that way, versus the soundtrack's 210bpm take, given the differences in how a real piano sounds versus the one on the soundtrack**), but it feels a little lame if i'm performing it at that speed because "well i just can't get it any faster," right! i want my choices to be SOLELY because i think they sound nicer :P
my piano teacher observed that i have an occasional tendency to "collapse" my pinky finger when playing—that's the thing where the middle knuckle bends downward, which is bad; you're supposed to be hitting the keys in a more perfectly up-down-vertical way, so that all your weight/energy/control is concentrated at the tip of your finger. and this issue isn't as noticeable when i'm playing easier literature, but, when i'm playing the virtuoso section of "Verso", that wobbly finger has cascading effects—it means i'm less stable/consistent, so even if i don't miss the note, hitting it in that unstable way it puts me subtly out of position in a way that will cause me to fuck up later parts of the run.
which is bad! so she gave me a very simple etude to practice which will hopefully help me focus on Not Doing That & retrain whatever obnoxious default setting i have that keeps wanting to do things the wrong way. (she seemed very anxious when suggesting this etude, as though worried i would find it too boring/tedious, which seemed odd to me. i wonder if she has a lot of students who just Only Want To Play Fun Stuff All The Time & she's used to catering to that mindset? but that is not me haha, i'll play a LOT of boring shit if it will in fact make me sound better; that's the whole reason i got a teacher, because i wasn't playing stuff to my own satisfaction and i couldn't figure out how to get better on my own.
she also suggested, very gently, as if worried about making me sad, that i put "Verso" away for a while i focus on trying to retrain my technique. i was like "lol i'm way ahead of you"—as soon as i got that recording finished (so i could feel emotionally "done" on some level), i started working on something else, because i could tell running the same stuff over and over wasn't really improving my performance very much even though i thought i was trying very hard to play it with better technique—i just kept falling back into bad habits—and i think if i take a 2-4 week break and come back to it fresh, i'll have a better shot of actually rewiring my fingers and hopefully play it a lot better.
so i started working on "Révérence" (the Old Lumiére theme), which is a really nice change of pace so far. it's easier than "Verso" imo, but certainly not trivial, and in the one lesson i've spent working on it with my teacher so far, she pointed out several sections where there's an opportunity to really slow down and focus while practicing because they're bits where i can build up those techniques that i'm working on. and the piece is much slower overall so i'm not worried at all about the "will i ever be able to get this up to tempo" question like i was with "Verso."
i did also get myself a book of Chopin's etudes so i can stare at them aspirationally. they look... even more terrible than expected LOL. i have my eyes on op 10 no 9, which sits at the nice intersection of "one of my favorites" and "one of the easier ones", but when i flipped to that page & piddled around for a few bars i was like... what the fuck... whose idea was that 5-4 fingering in the left hand??? that feels terrible who actually plays it like that??? and then i did some research and, uh, that's the original fingering suggested by Chopin himself, who did not have giant hands, and yeah it's very much by design—you're supposed to accommodate the 5-4 stretch via finger/wrist flexibility or some shit. horrid. anyway yeah i'm probably at least a year (more likely years...) from being able to really entertain any of these, but, it's fun to have them around for piddling now and again, at least~
also, i did have to take a couple days' break because i strained my right index finger + wrist somehow and i was freaked out that i'd injured them or something. at first i wondered if the culprit was Playing That Tricky Section Of "Verso" Over And Over With Shitty Technique—my hand definitely consistently feels sore after i play that piece a lot (my teacher says this won't happen if i learn to play with better technique; i'm tensing up / straining during the hard parts)... but usually it's sore in a way that feels like "lifted a lot of weights", which is uncomfortable but harmless, whereas this soreness was more like "if i fully extend/flex my index finger i get a shooting pain down my finger and into my wrist, especially if i point that finger toward the right, and to a lesser extent pinching stuff between index finger and thumb Just Hurts." it got fully better after two days' rest and in hindsight i think the culprit was Holding Phone Too Much In An Awkward Fashion (that index finger stretch is in fact the way i hold my phone). so, uh, i should keep an eye on that. i mean not that i need another reason to use my phone less. horrid little device; wish i didn't have to have one!
OH ALSO: i do have "Verso" memorized now lmao. i wasn't consciously trying to do that, and had no idea i'd done it, until one day i was at my piano & too lazy to go back downstairs to fetch my sheet music, so i just gave it a shot and... the whole piece came out. convenient! now i can torment people with blorbo music at the literal drop of a hat muahaha <3
* aside: "i have a digital piano; let me record the audio off of it exactly as it sounds" is a bafflingly complex problem to solve???? i can give The Full Saga in the comments to anyone who cares but. tl;dr this was like at least a week and a half of A/V hell lmao. MOSTLY HANDLED BY MY PARTNER, because he's great & that was included in the whole birthday deal, but i was Taking Notes so i could know/handle everything myself eventually and. good god. afterwards i asked a former-professional-sound-engineer friend how he PUTS UP with all this nonsense and he's like "i mean, well, i very much didn't; you'll notice i eventually left that career" lmao
** i'm like 50% certain the song on the soundtrack is actually overlaying multiple digital pianos—the reverb/timbre/etc sounds notably different for some parts, in a way that they wouldn't if it was All Being Played On The Same Piano—so even with perfect technique it's impossible for a human performance of "Verso" to sound identical to the one on the soundtrack. which is disappointing in some ways but also exciting in others—i can't sound like that so i get to pick what i'd like to sound like instead!—and, yeah, i do think playing it a bit downtempo emphasizes the lushness/darkness/mysteriousness of the piece in important ways. i wouldn't want to play it much slower than 185bpm—it needs to be quick to still have that propulsive energy—but playing it So Super Fast is less impressive when all the notes must be pedaled as one & thus the fast section will never found as distinct/stocatto-y as the soundtrack.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-25 09:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-26 05:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-27 09:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-28 11:32 pm (UTC)