Song#1 Missing Piece - Recording Stage

Ding-dong ding-dong! It's part 3 of 5 today, which means RECORDING DAY! -ragequits-

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording Stage
4. Mastering Stage
5. Final Product

In case you are new here, here's the intro blog.

Recording

Me practicing for recording

There are several approaches to recording your own compositions, namely:

1. Practice like you're going to perform in a concert
2. Simply sight-read your way through with multiple takes then go through editing hell
3. Practice until you can get 95% accuracy and lightly edit (I did this)

 I used the instrument of choice, which is practically the only piano I had lying around for the past 20 years which is a Yamaha Clavinova CVP-107

 

The info panel underneath

And so I hooked up my favourite earphones (it's d-Jays by the way) to get more privacy during mistakes made. Like typical 'industry practice', I stuck all music sheets together in one continuous page to avoid page turning.

All stuck together

Angel and Gnome of Pianistic Studies

I did about like seven takes before I got the final take to 95% accuracy (lucky me). Also, advice from the pros - record at night, because there's no one to disturb you :)

The Final Take, phew!

 One thing neat about this old Clavinova is that back in those days, they had about 20kb of internal memory, which is insufficient for this song. They included a diskette or a floppy disk interface where you could add memory and transfer the MIDI recorded elsewhere.

Still working like new!

 After I spent about like a paltry 100kB of memory (in today's standards) for seven takes, I used the Step Edit function to individually edit notes, timing and velocity of the MIDI.
For those of you who still have this relic of a Clavinova, you can access it by pressing the Rec button > Next Pg button until you see the Step Edit selection. Pressing the perimeter button will ask you to wait few seconds to reach the display below:

Step Edit function

So basically I went through the whole song and combed it for any mistakes and whatnot. Editing was done via the 4-5 buttons below which are:

1. Timing - which is when in the music that the note starts playing
2. Note Number - the note on the keyboard
3. Velocity - how loud/soft the note is
4. Gate Time - the duration of the note

Items and their meanings

Again, I spare the readers from the details of MIDI editing through the Step Edit Function, which you can read at length from the instruction manual linked below.









After editing I saved it back onto the floppy disk to be transferred to my PC. For starters, finding a floppy disk to USB reader wasn't easy nowadays, considering the extinction of the format itself. Honestly, I'm pretty surprised that my floppies still held up all these years! <fingers crossed>

On another note, I have thought of recording direct through the headphone cable to the microphone port of a laptop, as I've did previously on other songs like the Ballad of the Green Mats. Unfortunately, the audio artifacts and the cable interference is too much to remove through audio editing, so I scrapped the whole idea altogether. Probably it's due to the connection ports being rusty or something.

Stay tuned for Part IV of  V for this song!

More info!


Instruction manual - https://www.manualslib.com/products/Yamaha-Clavinova-Cvp-107-36125.html
Product info - http://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical-instruments/keyboards/digitalpianos/cvp_series/cvp107/

Song#1 Missing Piece - Composing and Arranging Stage

How's your day? This time I'm back with part 2 of 5. Here, it's all practically about arranging, as the composing was done earlier. Also, I've settled on the name of this song - Missing Piece, since the music represents the ups and downs of a relationship, but in the end he/she is your missing piece in this world.

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording Stage
4. Mastering Stage
5. Final Product

In case you are new here, here's the intro blog.

Arranging

In this section, I introduced more complex chord structure to the existing RH melody by adding the 7th, 9th or 11th. 

Basically, if its a C chord, I'll add the 7th note (Bb) to become a C7 chord:

C-E-G-Bb

I'm not going to go into the details of music theory here, but you can check out the links at the bottom for more info

In other words:

 

 becomes

Doing this addition of notes makes the chord sound richer, something like adding spice to the soup.
Next, I fixed the last section before the ending recap of the theme:

Where previously, the melody seemed a little all over the place...

I settled for a somewhat joyous celebratory melody with the same LH notes

 

 Also, I tidied up several sections, just to maintain the uniformity of the pattern, like:

BEFORE

 AFTER

Spotted the difference?

Song Analysis

If you're still with me and not screaming at the screen, here's the breakdown of the finished song:

The Scream - Munch

1.  Intro
2. Verse 1
3. Motif/chorus
4.  Verse 2
5. Motif/ chorus variation 1
6. Verse 3
7. Motif/ chorus variation 2
8. Verse 4
9. Motif/ chorus variation 3

And here's the finished score!

https://www.4shared.com/office/7kmSWVy9ba/Missing_Piece.html

Stay tuned for Part III of  V for this song!

More about chord theory here!
https://inztro.blogspot.my/2013/12/the-11th-piano-chords.html
https://guitarsix.com/blog/lessons/chord-construction-part-3-7th-chords-and-beyond/132/1/

Song#1 Missing Piece - Idea Stage

Hi everyone! I'm finally back with an update! In case you are new here, welcome to my 1 year blog on making 7 songs to propose to my beloved! So here's how each blog on every song would be formatted:

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording Stage
4. Mastering Stage aka apply-some-magic-time
5. Final Product

Source

When I was thinking about what would best be for the first song of the proposal, I thought of doing a piano instrumental. After all, I'm an amateur pianist first before being an composer/arranger.

I actually had a few good source material from my old collections of Random Impromptu Playing (such a mouthful!). Try hearing my Random 3 below.




Ta-daa! I'd admit that wasn't very polished after all. I just made that up in one sitting at the keyboard some 5 years ago.

During the playing process, I utilised a simple Left Hand accompaniment style and a recurring musical hook (at 1'56"). I also jumped around the keyboard, using the higher octaves and lower octaves before changing the style nearing the end.

I guess this song has no conventional structure unlike typical pop songs (part A-part B-Chorus)

Next, I set about to transcribe what I recorded from MIDI into Finale, which looks horrendous like this

which is totally out of alignment (given that I didn't record based on the keyboard metronome) and looks terrible.

Transcription

And so, I transcribed the whole thing again into legible score (phew!) which you can download for free below!

PDF - https://www.4shared.com/office/OJQbehEYba/Random_3.html
XML - https://www.4shared.com/document/WY675QSVce/Random_3.html

Stay tuned for Part II of  V for this song!