Piano Secrets Masterclass for Pi Day 2022

Another video already? Yes. I thought it'd take longer, because the footage I captured felt like a mess and I thought I'd have to start over, maybe with a proper script. But once I got into the editing groove it only took a couple days to wrangle the footage into something that works.

Or at least I hope it works, for its intended audience, which is pianists and the piano curious. And I'll be curious to hear if people are interested in this kind of video, though I'll probably try to do more like it either way because I enjoyed leaning into the more technical musician side of me for a video, and I have a lot of piano compositions in my backlog. I hope I'll get better at the format, because I don't usually make videos without a script. Though I did enjoy adding little text snippets to fill in where I didn't mention something out loud at the time.

I've been wanting to try out piano lectures of some sort for the past decade, and I've even attempted to film and edit them in the past. But one of the frustrations is getting the audio to not be 100% terrible, or so out of sync that I'm left with a very frustrating mess of footage and audio that hate each other, not to mention also struggling with the challenges of a new format while also simultaneously being the director, composer, writer, performer, editor, etc etc etc. So in the past I've scrapped everything and given up.

The difference this time is I finally finished upgrading all my equipment, and now it's just a lot easier for me to work with a massive pile of footage, and I have audio that syncs with my camera instead of doing its best to interrupt seven simultaneous workflows at every level of consciousness. If anyone's interested, maybe I'll do an update about my current setup sometime. I like to think next time the technical part will be so much easier that I'll also have enough brainpower left over to make the content a little less chaotic.

I'm not expecting this video to perform well, being a first try in a new format. But since I choose not to have YouTube ads it's not like it loses me anything. Y'all're the only audience that matters. So what else should I do now that I can easily record at the piano?

🐌,

Vi