Video!

It might not seem like much to some of you who have just wandered onto my website from Zanzibar, but I feel the need to pat myself of the back.

A couple of weeks ago I managed to effect another of the great transitions here at Pianonoise, that being the jump to video.

I know, it sounds kind of cro-magnon.

I don't mean I'd never heard of it before, and I'm not that old. I don't have problems using my microwave, for instance.

Over the past couple of years I've managed to livestream recitals, and post videos on social media. And of course I've been running this website on my own for nearly two decades, recording most of the audio files myself, and fixing coding mistakes when needed (I use a WYSIWYG editor which means I don't have to laboriously tell the computer what to do in its own language line by line, but sometimes the software is a little dense and then I have to go fix things as if I knew how to code and its then that my background as a 10 year old video game designer comes in handy even if those computers are long gone!)

But I hadn't actually managed to post videos on the site, nor create the kind that you might record and edit not as a live concert stream but as a thing engineered. 

Naturally I chose the week before Christmas to do this. The conventional wisdom is that you should always do a new kind of thing on new equipment, like a new computer, and new software, on a tight deadline such as before a major holiday. Or maybe you are NOT supposed to do it that way. I forget.

Anyhow, my seven-and-a-half year old laptop crapped out the day before Thanksgiving, giving me the opportunity to buy a new tablet with real processing power, and the fact that lots of video editing programs are now out there for far less than the hundreds of dollars they cost a few years ago meant that I now had a realistic shot at making videos. My fairly new phone is also a serious upgrade from what I had before, with a vastly superior camera and much more storage space, so that set me up very well. And the final link in the chain was that we have been having church virtually and have been sending in recorded music and I wanted to do something special for Christmas. Usually we use audio recordings (MP3s) but this time I decided to go video.

Also, since Christmas (liturgically) runs from Dec 25 until Jan 6 (or the Sunday before that last date) that meant three videos, all in a week.

And naturally, I had to pretend I had six cameras, and add cutaway shots from fun angles, most of which I was able to shoot myself (sometimes with one hand while I played with the other) and integrate into the complete performance that I was using as the master take. It was fun--and very stressful.

As this blog "airs" the last of those three videos is available on the home page. I'll probably take it down next week. But you can count on more of them rolling out in the future. Not right away, I imagine (I need a break). And since those are Christmas videos I probably won't archive them just yet. But I'm getting the piano tuned soon and am thinking about making some recordings that can exist as either audio or video, so that pianonoise radio gets more content, and some visuals make it onto the homepage.

It's the kind of revolution I don't think we've had around here since 2011, when the modern audio catalog was born. Kind of exciting.

I'm still having trouble with external links on the new blogger platform. If you want to access the audio catalog just put this into your browser:    www.pianonoise.com/Listen.PianoMusic.htm