daniel-trace




hardware:   Apple MacBook (intel)/OSX, Steinway piano (obviously...)
software:   RTcmix, Amadeus sound editor, SPEAR, Apple Logic Pro

This is from the January 3, 2013 entry in my mm-blog: 
Here is the new piece I finished last month:

	daniel-trace

I started it last fall, after Daniel had left for college.  It's
similar in spirit to the piece I had done for Lian when she left
for Brown, lian-summer-echoes.

Our children are now on their own, doing things they want to do
with their lives.  Jill and I are official "empty nesters".  The
daniel-trace piece for Daniel is based on some recordings I made
of him practicing for his final piano recital here at home.  It's
chock-full of 'inside jokes' and hidden audio remembrances (Here's
one:  listen closely as the crickets "shift" towards the end of the
piece.  The first cricket sounds were recorded as I walked around
Roosevelt this past August, recovering from my transplant.  The second
(two) recordings were made outside Akira Takaoka's cabin in Nagano
prefecture.  A close listening as the "shift" occurs might reveal a
young voice in the background -- Daniel when he was about ten years
old.)  daniel-trace was one of my Christmas gifts to Daniel.

This was a fun piece to do, although getting the musical alignment right was sometimes tricky. I hadn't discovered the 'flex-time' capability of Logic yet. Also, here's another 'inside-joke': The de- and re-constructed sound that opens the piece is the sound of Daniel's iPhone alarm. I heard it almost every school-day morning during Daniel's high-school career. The pieces I excerpted were [Bach, Brahms, Chopin?].

I wrote a bit more about the idea of music as a gift in my January 3 blog entry. Daniel! Lian! We miss you! But we are so proud and happy about how life is developing for you both.