I have always wanted to be able to write and play my own music.
I had given up on any hope of doing it myself, but I lamented this
fact and wanted my children to be able to make music. To this end,
I bought a cheapy keyboard and left it around the house for my
daughter to play with. She never took an interest, so thinking
she might try to emulate her dad, I started to play with it from
time to time. This lead to a four year journey where I became
'good' enough to need a better keyboard. I bought a proper Roland
digital piano and it has been a great experience for yours truly.
My daughters take a passing interest in the new piano, but I am
still wondering if they will ever really take it up. Meantime, I
played until I really enjoyed it. I started right away to pick out
my own compositions and after a while I could play them well
enough that I decided to stick with it.
I eventually wrote and played in one take a little piece that I
call 'Brockville Muse'. Remember, I'm a self-taught duffer and
it's not professional music. However, it amuses myself and
since I had talked about this with a bunch of people who had
never heard what I meant, I set about recording my piece to midi,
adding a string background, dumping to a .wav file and converting
to an MP3 for your listening pleasure. Here it is:
Let me know what you think.
The recording is a bit rough and of course my keyboarding leaves a little to be desired.
Despite all of that, I still think it's amusing. The piece has two tracks. One is a single take
of my little composition. The other track is the same piece, but rendered as orchestral
strings. There was a byzantine series of steps to get here, and I can't write out the
instructions, but here's what I used:
Some noodling and a little practice (4 years) to compose the music
Roland digital piano with midi output to computer
PowerTracks Pro Audio under Windows 98 to .wav file
lame_iclv5_p3.exe under Windows 2000 to convert to .mp3
I might eventually post the score for this monster, but it runs
to about ten pages or more. I'd like to, though. The piece is nicer
than it sounds here and the score sure looks impressive to me!
