dispatches

The latest obsession

A little while ago Elly gave me her Yamaha electric keyboard. She might as well have given me a mainline supply of crack cocaine. 

I have completely succumbed to the spell of the piano. It is all I want to do. For two days I just played scales and swam in the different feelings that different keys gave me. I figured out the C-F-G chord thing that can go along with a whole lot of melodies. I found about a gazillion variations within Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I started cruising YouTube for tutorials, and fell under the spell of Bach. For the last week I've been learning to decode musical notation with the help of the Prelude in C Major. 

The last two days I've had piano lessons from two different teachers. Both are treating me a bit like a prodigy, which is fun for the self esteem. I have no business playing as well as I am after two weeks. But when it becomes necessary to perch a clock near the thing so I don't forget what part of the day I'm in, progress is going to happen in short order to anyone. 

Today I found someone who I want to work with for awhile. He is of the firehose mode of information transfer, my favorite type. Right away he was challenging me to come up with minor diminished chords on command, and correcting my hand and seat position. I knew that I needed some outside influence before I acquired a host of unconscious bad habits, which may be one reason the fiddle never took. I learned the notes by mimicking my favorite fiddle recordings, with no attention to technique.  By the time I got some professional attention I had ways of holding the bow that I was never able to overcome, and I never mastered proper intonation. This was shortly before I met Robin, and she was not keen on sharing a house with a beginning, out of tune fiddler. I made my choice. 

This instrument I can plug headphones into if necessary, though I'm already starting to rearrange the living room in my mind to accommodate an upright. At today's lesson I couldn't believe the difference the weight of a real piano key made, and the subtlety it imparted. 

If only there wasn't this pesky business that I'm supposed to run. 

iPhone vs Flip Smackdown!

I was at a party, and one of my favorite local fiddlers, Devon Leger, was about to play a tune. I just happened to have two video cameras in my pocket: a Flip Mino HD, and my iPhone. 

I leaned both cameras against the door frame, one in each hand. The one with finger in the frame is the iPhone, which I held steady for one long take. With the Flip I got fancy―I got multiple angles, I zoomed, and I panned.  

In Compressor, I cropped the iPhone footage to match the 16:9 format of the Flip when I converted both to ProRes. In the first two cuts I alternated the sound―the clips with the captions have sound from just that camera. After that, I ran both audio tracks together. 

The sound is better than I thought it would be, particularly from the Flip. The video quality is about what I expected―the iPhone is a toy, not a camera. The Flip looks a lot better. 

I'm keeping the 5D's though. 

Music on the beach

I just got back, well sunburned, from three days of music at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. I've been going for 16 years, Robin for 28. Forgot to take a card reader and had to wait until I got home to see the photos, just like the old days. They wouldn't let me bring a video camera (I asked), so just stills. Set's on Flickr.

No day 3 for me

I'm staying away from the fray today, mostly because the grounds of Seattle Center will look like it does in this photo for most of the day. Without my refuge of the dance hall (which may be as crowded, but it's a crowd in motion in an organized fashion), Folklife swamps the defenses against my latent agoraphobia.

Photos from the past two days in this Flickr set.

U. Utah Phillips 1935-2008

A towering figure in the folk music scene, Utah Phillips died peacefully in his sleep last night. On the schedule at Folklife this afternoon was a tribute to Utah Phillips. He was scheduled to appear, but was too sick to travel. “This is how he figured out a way to show up,” a friend said to me. 

Details here and here.