Week 2: First Steps

Sachi Hi Sachi! Thank you for sharing your work on these tricky measures. You have a nice balance of layers developing. I feel that your melody sings clearly and spins out naturally over chords. 

No need to be apologetic about using pedal btw. When Chopin does not indicate pedal, it does not actually mean 'no pedal'. The pedal marks he does give are just particularly important such as where a change should take place to avoid obscuring the harmony; to prevent a pianist from perhaps making too many pedal changes; to sustain important bass tones that you have to release to continue playing with the LH; or to help express an important rhetorical moment. This prelude in particular definitely needs pedal throughout. If you only use it where he has pedal markings, your sonority will constantly change! He even marks this section 'sostenuto' which indicates a sustained sound throughout. So your instincts are correct! With the dense texture you may also find half pedal to be desirable. 

Dustin Anderson Hi Dustin. Thank you so much for listening and generously offering me your feedback. I don’t have a teacher at the moment, so your advice feels like rain in the desert🌵

I will use pedals according to Chopin’s pedal marks, and by listening carefully. 

Sachi Sounds great! I am working on this one too. So much more difficult than it sounds but so worth the effort to learn this one.

Vidhya Bashyam Hi Vidhya. I ‘m glad to hear that you love this prelude, too. This one has healing powers to my soul. I really wish to be able to play this, hopefully from memory (more «new hope» might be needed)😅

Sachi You really convey the phrasing beautifully!

Hi Gail Ravin Starr Thank you for encouragement. It needs lots of work. Getting slowly familiar day by day😊

Dustin Anderson Awesome playing Dustin! 

Dustin Anderson thanks for posting Dustin , very instructive with the notation, to see how these ‘shimmering‘ effects are  produced from the music , I look forward to the final performance 

btw lovely sounding piano , what is it ? 

Ken Radford  Mark Cooper Thank you for listening! Mark, my piano is a Yamaha C2X.

Dustin Anderson I assume you are happy with it? I have an old yamaha G3 according to my piano tuner / technician is approaching the end of its useful life, and he is advising me to get the model you have ( I hope he isn’t getting a kick back from   yamaha !)

Mark Cooper Yes, I am very happy with it! I have it had for about a year now. Yes your G series piano would be well travelled at this point though you still pull some great sound out of it in your recent recording =) You should try a C2X / C3X out if you can and see for yourself but I think you will find that the CX series is capable of surprising nuance. I have not played a G3 recently but I do think you'd find it to be an exciting upgrade!

Dustin Anderson So colorful!

Michelle R Great! =)You definitely have a more focused energy to your sound and a more natural flow to the notes. You also look much more relaxed in the hand. Glad it is coming together for you. Nice memory work too!

Dustin Anderson Thanks so much, Dustin. 

Noel Nguyen this wasn’t tedious at all Noel , actually fun to watch (despite the restricted view of your left hand)

btw I’ve got the same practice piano , it’s great 

as for the final noodling , I’m a bit behind you there in chasse neige , but what I’ve got so far does bear a vague resemblance to what you’ve managed to produce !

let’s press on 😂

Mark Cooper  Thanks for your encouraging words Mark! And yes it's a great practice instrument. Perhaps on the flimsy side, but it's true that I used to play less delicately so those years must have taken a toll on it.

Doug  Haha! I cannot speak for others but I am glad to reassure you with my answer which has absolutely nothing esoteric as you will see.

My acoustic piano is actually not at my main residence but rather at the one I share with my father who lives 20mins away. In fact it was initially at the main residence but I decided to move it to the other place because it has better acoustics for recordings. Voila!

I'm glad to know that for the first time in years you will sleep well tonight 😂.

Doug  They're interchangeable to me now but it took me a few months to learn to translate back and forth, when the two instruments were still under the same roof. It's like learning two languages at the same time.

In fact, the Kawai has a few tweakable settings in terms of sound and response, and I made it as similar to the acoustic as possible during those 2+ years under the same roof. So it took quite some time, jumping back and forth between the two.

Noel Nguyen this is pretty amazing already and not nearly as horrifying as you are making it out to be! That big, full Rachmaninoff sound is all there, and it has crispness and clarity at the same time. It’s coming together! The “noodling” at the end, especially the bit of self-conscious hesitation right at the beginning of it, made me laugh out loud. 🤣 

Doug I personally noticed that last year when I was out of the house for an extended period with no access to my piano and had to play a digital, it was a pretty different experience from playing the acoustic, and I missed my piano.

I got my Seiler a few months after the remodeling was finished, because the old piano was pretty out-of-tune and rehabilitating it was going to be expensive, and because I was planning to upgrade at some point anyway we just decided to upgrade then. My playing improved quite a bit when I switched from the digital to the Seiler.

Anyway, I do not believe that they are interchangeable. I actually had the unhappy realization while testing pianos (more specifically, when I played a Bösendorfer 225) that my unresponsive Yamaha digital had caused me to build bad habits such as "threshing" and etc.

Doug said: 

Guess who agrees with me on this?  Just only every great composer from the past!  Ha ha.  Including this guy....

And including this composer!