…it’s coming…
August 3rd, 2005 @ 13:40 by NormMonkey
From the all-ahead-weddings department:
Lemme tell you about my grandmother.
(This will eventually tie in to a story about an upcoming wedding. Bear with me.)
My memere was, among a great many other good things, a very good planner. She had Christmas gifts purchased and waiting in closets years in advance. If she were going on a trip she’d have her bags packed a month beforehand.
I did not inherit this quality.
My sister’s wedding is coming up in less than a week. I *just* finished recording the final version of a song for the wedding last night, and today I’m preparing the final edit which I must email to her friend who’ll be singing the lyrics, so she can practise.
[TANGENT: Imagine a guy, sitting at a piano with seven pages of music to play. There’s a recorder sitting on the piano, standing by. Seven pages don’t fit on the piano stand. I can fit four pages wide, if I hang them off the edges a little. Pages two through four repeat. Pages five through seven are stacked behind page four.
Like most [incredibly lame single] people, I play the piano to an audience of none (well, OK sometimes the cats listen). Much like this blog, for me it’s a way to release and express creativity. On occasions where I get to perform for people, I generally do OK ’cause I know that I’m gonna make mistakes and I can’t go back on them, so instead I just get wrapped up in the music and let the creativity flow.
Recording is different. The fact that I can scrap a recording and start over hovers around me like a heavy cloak. This fact, along with the idea that it is theoretically possible to record a perfect take sits in the back of my mind like a quiet but annoying static that you can almost ignore, but not quite. The static says something like, “Not touching, can’t get mad. You *know* you’re gonna make a mistake and then have to start over again. Not touching, can’t get mad” in a sort of stressful, pressuring way.
As a result I end up doing ten or twenty takes before I get one with only a couple of minor mistakes. The worst part is that I’ll always play through to the end of the recording, even after a bunch of major mistakes. Knowing that I’ll be doing that anyways doesn’t help. The little stressful pressure of recording is always there. Anybody who ever records or performs for audiences regularly is reading this and laughing at me right now.
Anyways, this is how the song goes (remembering that I can only fit four pages wide on the stand): I play through the 1st page and at a convenient point in the 2nd, I use my right hand to discard the 1st, tossing it on the floor beside me. At a convenient point in the 3rd page I start to reorganize the 2, 3 and 4 pages so that the 5th is also exposed on the stand. Then I play through to the 4th and jump back to the repeat on page 2. Again on the 3rd I discard page 2 and finish the reorganizing. At a convenient point on the 5th I discard 3 and 4 and expose page 6. Finally, at a convenient point on page 6 I expose the final page 7. Trying to quickly shuffle the slippery pages with one hand while playing with the other makes mistakes even easier to make.
Let’s just say that I was at this for two hours last night, all to record a 5 minute song. Halfway through I got frustrated and watched a TV episode on DVD to relax a bit.
End tangent.]
Last night I wrote down a list of the things I need to do to prepare before leaving on Friday morning (which is two days away, yikes!). There are still ten items on the list.
Let the running-around-like-a-chicken-with-his-head-cut-off begin.
