A New Way to Record

July 26, 2019 at 11:28 am | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Wanna bet I can’t play my 7th etude (called “Floating”) without touching the keys?

Don’t believe me? Watch the whole video:

Am I master magician? Nope, Yamaha has invented a genius and terrifying new way to record a solo piano album using Disklavier technology. Read on to find out!

If you’re not familiar with the Disklavier, it’s a 21^st century, digital version of the player piano. It’s fully capable of playing back anything you play with 1024 levels of key and hammer velocity and 256 increments of pedal position. It’s also capable of recreating performances live across the country or across continents, a feature that’s mostly used for long-distance teaching, but has also been used for a splashy Yamaha event where Elton John played a “live” performance on Disklaviers in 11 countries throughout the world.

Yamaha has decided to offer their artists use of this instrument for recording purposes for a pretty revolutionary recording experience. Here’s how it works:

• You perform your pieces on the instrument. Right now, the best place to do this is at the magical Yamaha Artist Salon on 5^thAvenue in New York, overlooking high fashion shops and a bustling city street. They’re recorded not as audio, but as MIDI data. This means there aren’t any microphones, but instead, the piano is saving files with information about pitch, timing velocity, length, and pedal.
• You get to edit the data. Amazingly, you can actually take this MIDI data home and play around with it. You can pretty much change the data in any way you want, although I was advised not to edit too highly or the music might ultimately sound “artificial.”
• You play the edited tracks back through the piano, now fully mic’d to create an audio recording. Voila! You’ve got a CD!

 

The Good

• You can fix mistakes! There are so many things that can go wrong in a regular recording session. A single wrong note might make a take unusable or you might spend hours attempting to edit out a misplayed chord. Now, changing virtually anything about the performance is as easy as dragging and dropping. The engineer, Aaron, advised me, “Just get the poetry of the music right. Everything else we can fix.”
• Outside noise isn’t a problem. I had videographers running around while I was performing. Deliverymen entered the studio while I was mid-take. Usually, we would have had to stop the session because the microphones would pick up all the disruptions….but since the piano wasn’t actually recording audio, we were able to continue recording without concern.
• Editing is wonderful! It’s powerful! It’s educational! I learned so much about my piano playing by going into editing detail. I was able to clean up mistakes, catch places where my score differed from my performances, and even fill in some improvisations that sounded empty. I almost felt guilty adding, changing, and cutting so liberally, but I kept reminding myself that the goal is to make the best-sounding, most-enjoyable music for my audience.

Look at the editing view for a part of my Etude #2 “Van Gogh’s Dream” at two different levels of detail, You can see that you can edit the position, pitch, length, and velocity of each note.

The Bad

• The piano has to be exactly the same. I recorded the MIDI data in March but didn’t record the audio until June. In that time, even with world-class maintenance from the Yamaha team, a piano will change. For example, the pedal height had changed in the meantime, so we had to spend quite a long time trying to find the pedal height that would most accurately replicate my original performance. I think we did pretty well, but there were a couple tracks on which I wonder if the pedaling is really, exactly…mine.
• Over-editing happens. Once you canbe perfect, if you’re an obsessive perfectionist like me, it’s hard to not try to be perfect. I didn’t get totally psycho with the editing – I think it very much still sounds like me playing the music – but I would understand arguments that I over-edited some places for cleanliness. Maybe some character was traded for cleanliness, maybe not. It’s hard to say for sure.
• You lose some atmosphere. I’m a pianist who unconsciously vocalizes with my playing. Although I’m by no means a “good singer,” I kind of like hearing some of my favorite instrumentalists sing, groan, or moan along with the music (I’m looking at you, Keith Jarrett and Kurt Rosenwinkel). I wouldn’t want vocalization to be distracting, but I sometimes enjoy hearing how emotionally invested a musician is. With this Disklavier recording process, that element is lost entirely.

The Ugly

Lastly, using this process, you can create technically unplayable piano pieces, á la Conlon Nancarrow. I decided my 8^thetude could use a visceral, impactful treatment, so I made this version, where there is often the equivalent of 3 pianists performing over 6-8 octaves:

 

Overall, I had a totally fantastic experience recording for Disklavier. For a solo piano recording, the advantages can’t be beat and the “extracurricular” possibilities are still mostly untapped.

Consider a Donation

I hope you’ll consider donating to my Kickstarter and pre-ordering the CD and book of my Perpetual Motion Etudes.

Click here to visit the Kickstarter page.