The first was Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player “Strong pianists, on the other hand, have an image of what a perfect performance should be like that includes all of the relevant senses. Before we sit down, we know what the piece needs to feel,..” In essence, know what you are practicing and why, practice the hard bits, visualize before you play.

From the software world, Rich Hickey espouses “Hammock-Driven Development in Thought for the New Year: Step Away from the Computer asks “When was the last time you thought about something for an entire hour?” And in How to Increase Productivity and Enjoy Life More Tony Schwartz points out that our bodies have a 90 minute rhythm of alertness that we should follow. All three articles suggest the same recipe.

Imagine, Work, Enjoy … Repeat …

Jon and Steven are crowdsourcing their projects from The Piano Guys Founder’s page. They also have a YouTube channel about the making of some of the more elaborate videos, The Piano Guys Behind the Scenes.

via The Collaborative Pianist

One of the issues with live recordings is background noise. Athena and I were fortunate enough to have a great videographer, Giuseppe ‘Pino’ Sanfilippo record one of our concerts. He was recording from the back of the audience at an outdoor concert, so during a quiet solo piano passage the background street noise reared its head. Since I wanted to use the clip in our sampler video I had to find a way to save the track.

A poke around the net revealed How-To: Remove Background Noise in Soundtrack Pro by Rounik Sethi. Luckily Logic Studio installs Soundtrack Pro, and there were a few seconds of pure background noise recorded before I started playing. A few hours of following Rounik’s helpful advice and experimenting with the settings gave a presentable audio track that could sit with the surrounding clips. It’s the second to last clip from the Athena Tergis & Michael G. Rose Sampler Video.

Two of my favorite Scottish musicians are included. Karine Polwart, who is as eloquent in prose as in lyrics, discusses her first adventures in singing. Harpist Corrina Hewat describes a rebellious start, not surprising considering her trailblazing career that includes a wonderfully unique collaboration with her jazz pianist husband, David Milligan.

Playing with Liz Hanley at BCMFest 11 (photo: S. Smith)

I’ve just come from the Boston Celtic Music Fest (BCMFest) this past weekend. BCMFest is as much a party that Boston musicians throw for themselves as it is a music festival for the public. Fortunately their definition of ‘Boston musicians’ is loose enough to allow expats like myself and singer/fiddler Liz Hanley, who now lives in Brooklyn, to perform.

The weekend started with a spirited and occasionally rambunctious ceilidh. I was safely behind the piano, sitting in since half of the Boston Urban Ceilidh Band were delayed by snow. Oddly, I had previously met most of the other band members in Copenhagen during their tours with their individual projects. It was great to have a chance to play with them.

The day concerts on Saturday had the musicians playing in various combinations and performing music of various degrees of seriousness, as often less as more. Liz and I played a set of traditional songs, sharing the stage with two delightful singers, Liz Simmons and Hannah Sanders. We were also scheduled to contribute two songs to a session titled ‘Celtic Journey: Power Ballads”. Three days before the concert we found out the this was not meant to be long laments about the Irish diaspora. ‘Journey: Power Ballads’ was meant literally, as in Don’t Stop Believing. That meant three days of rehearsing Styx, REO Speedwagon, U2 and, or course, Journey. Laura Cortese emceed with a performance that should earn her a VJ slot on VH1. Our band also included Matt and Shannon Heaton, Flynn Cohen, Liz Simmons and Mariel Vandersteel, the world’s only 80′s cover band that had 5 singers, 2 guitars, 2 fiddles and a piano.

The day concerts ended with a So You Think You Can Sing parody that featured Celtic Women vs. Enya vs. Celtic Thunder. Words cannot do justice to this performance. The brave can view it on YouTube, though the names have been removed to protect the guilty. Halali and friends played a wonderful concert on Saturday night. Their final encore was a tour-de-force that displayed the many facets of the weekend; fiddles, fun, cover tunes, and still more fun and fiddles.

The organizers, Laura Cortese, Shannon Heaton, Emerald Rae and Sean Smith, and all the volunteers deserve a big round of kudos. It was as fun a weekend of music as I’ve had in a long time.

Somehow I managed to return home with local Tuscan honey instead of wine, a mistake that won’t be repeated.

There was a talk by Dynascore, an early stage startup developing middleware for manipulating audio clips for interactive applications. I think the real problem is in tools to help composers produce music in short clips in the first place. If Dynascore can move in this direction then they’ll have something useful.

Kudos to Nevin Eronde for organizing the group and the meetings. To keep up to date on the IGDA Bar meetings sign up to the IGDA.dk Facebook page.