On rejuvenation and remixes

Sigh. It’s been a bad month for piano-stuffs. Work stress has left me totally uninterested in doing anything but vegging when I get home, so that combined with the fact that I wasn’t really getting anywhere on any of the pieces I was working on kind of killed my initiative for a while there.

In an effort to get going again, I decided to take a step back and try some different music. I spent a couple of days downloading and compiling music from games and shows that I’ve liked over the years, and I have a nice hefty notebook full now. I spent some time this weekend plinking away at a few things and found myself much rejuvenated, so that’s a plus.

I do have one of my Chopin preludes ready to be recorded… I just need to sit down and play it until I get a clean run. I’ve left my MP3 player on the piano in encouragement – no portable musica for me until I have successfully recorded! Incentive!

One last little rant: in looking for new music to play, I’ve discovered that I have absolutely no ability to judge how difficult a piece is going to be by looking at it. I either slightly overestimate or grossly underestimate how hard the piece will be in practice, regardless of whether I’ve listened to it or just looked at the music. It’s very frustrating. Ok – two rants: part of the problem there is that all of the game music I’ve been looking at is either trivially easy or entirely ridiculous. Take the Kingdom Hearts Hollow Bastion theme… I have two versions of it – the original, and a fan re-interpretation. The original version looked intimidating, but I sat down and played it through hands together in one go. It was entirely trivial. The fan version, on the other hand, starts with a 10^th chord that it wants me to hold the bottom note of while doing a bunch of other crap. C’mon guys, can I get a little middle ground here?

Right. End ranting! The bright side is that I’m feeling much more inclined to play going into April, and I hope to have a new recording up within a week or so!