The countdown begins (and a gear epiphany)
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
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Fanfare, the concert featuring the first performance of the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel piano concerto, is in 6 days! If you are in or around Boston on June 15, please come! If you are unable to make it, but are able to bully someone else into going, please do so. :)
Tickets and event info are available here.
There will be no post next week, for hopefully clear reasons.
Somehow, I am one week out from performing the Hensel piano concerto, and I don’t know what’s more exhausting, the practicing or managing the mental/emotional rollercoaster of preparing for something that feels somewhat high-stakes. It’s become pretty normal to go from “Well, I think I’m prepared, not much to do really” to “Oh my GOD I am WILDLY unprepared I need three more weeks or months or maybe YEARS at LEAST” in the span of about five minutes, so that’s fun.
When neither “I’m doing this for other people” nor “I’m doing this for me ❤️” seem to work I just hit myself with “Actually, this doesn’t matter, nothing matters, a career is just a way to amuse yourself until you die” and oddly that actually seems to do the trick. Nihilism: it’s basically smelling salts.
One thing that has, oddly, been helping a lot is the Drive to Survive series about Formula 1 racing on Netflix. First of all, it’s just enjoyable as heck because it’s got the ingredients you need for a good time: attractive people driving fast cars and making catty remarks about each other, solemn talking heads emphasizing that this is a big deal, drama up the wazoo.
Second of all, I identify a lot with the drivers (of course—I mean, who out here is identifying with the pit crew). “We’re not so different, you and I,” I think, watching fabulously rich men in motorsports with hordes of adoring fans swagger around risking death all so even more fabulously rich men in motorsports can become even richer.
As I’m facing down an event that rests crucially on my ability to deliver in the moment, I relate so hard to having to perform under pressure, meeting the weight of expectations, and being one of the outward faces in a larger spectacle that other people have invested so much time and money into, all for the sake of entertainment. If only I could also identify with having the huge paycheck.
I guess one reassuring thing to remember is that, unlike a Formula 1 driver, if I make a mistake at my heavy pedaled machine, it won’t spin out, flip over, or burst into flames.
Friends, countrymen, lend me your gear
I know so very little about audio gear and frankly, that’s perfectly fine with me. (That’s what sound engineers, audiophile friends, and husbands are for.) It’s not so much that I can’t learn, it’s more like a vague sense that once you start to care about things like audio quality and fidelity and stereo whatever, you really care, and then you’re spending ridiculous amounts of money on highly fragile specialty electronics that just clutter up your space and drown you in cables. No thank you.
I have a Roland Edirol (a powerful lil guy who has sadly been discontinued) that I used for recording lessons, listening back to myself in practice, and making the occasional audition tape through two conservatories and several music festivals, but I retired it a few years ago because I was tired of 1) having to constantly change out the batteries and clear the SD card and 2) having yet another thing in my bag. I’ve been using the voice memo app on my iPhone for a while now, which I will not try to convince you produces quality recordings, but the convenience!
Lately I have been finding myself wistfully missing my Edirol (it’s right there languishing in the corner but, like, I miss it in a spiritual way) wishing I could somehow attach its actually-good-recording capabilities to my phone, so I begrudgingly trudged through the muck of SEO-optimized Google results for iPhone-friendly recording gear. This is how I found out that they make little recorder attachments that plug into your phone now. How long has this been a thing???
Because audio gear reviews just confuse and distress me I bought the Zoom iQ7 because 1) I recognized Zoom as “the other good recorder company” from when I originally got my Roland, and 2) the 7 is the newest version of the product at the same price as the older models and I have very low standards so whatever differences there may be mean nothing to me. When it came I plugged it into my phone, tested out recording myself with and without it, and then immediately started cursing myself out for not caring about audio earlier.
Here’s me playing the beginning of Louise Farrenc’s Etude in F# minor, recorded using the iPhone microphone:
And here’s me playing the same thing with the Zoom iQ7 plugged in:
(There is some clicking and I’m not entirely sure what that is.)
The difference is most stark if you listen with headphones, but even on crappy speakers it’s pretty noticeable. There’s more ambient noise and echoing and the sound of the piano itself isn’t quite as rounded in the video recorded by the built-in iPhone mic. In other videos I made, the audio doesn’t sound as noisy when I play loudly, which I didn’t think was possible to adjust when recording on my phone.
So, uh, I’m sorry to everyone for the extreme shittiness of my practice videos to date. We could have had something better this whole time!!!
And just as I feared, this made me realize how great having just a little bit of audio gear can be. If one little microphone attachment makes such a big difference, what else can all the gear out there do for me? Oh no, it’s happening.
My mental state: just this song, over and over again
I don’t think I have to explain that it says a lot about where I am mentally when I choose to listen to one song over and over again for literal days on end.
We don’t need a whole explanation of how I discovered Ludo’s “Overdone”, a song off an album that came out in 2010. Is it the best song off the album? I wouldn’t say so. Is it even a good song? I have no idea, because once you listen to a song some, I don’t know, several hundred times, you kind of lose all sense of taste or objectivity.
How am I doing? I sat down the other day and put this on and hit “back” every time the song finished and didn’t move from my seat and before I knew it more than an hour and a half had passed and the only thing I had listened to the whole time was this song.
So, you know, I’m doing great! I think this song is what’s holding me together!
If nothing else, this just shows that I am nothing but consistent: this track is in 6/8, and we all know how I feel about 6/8.
I am now off to pack and will attempt not to freak out while doing so. See you all in two weeks! 🎹