...for every time somebody watched one of my videos, I'd have about $13,000. Funny how just a couple of years ago we were celebrating 20,000 YouTube views over the first two-and-a-half years. And now we're at 260,000. (It sounds more impressive if you pronounce it "a quarter million").
So thanks to the viewers from 188 countries, the 457 subscribers, and the hundreds who "liked", "shared", "commented" and "favorited". Without you I'd be just some guy who makes amateur piano videos in his spare ti...
Time to take inspiration from my wife and my cousin and come out of blog hibernation. It's been a wild few months, but I hope to get a week in April to record some new videos. Until then, let me sneak in a little celebration of a recent YouTube milestone. On March 29, I reached 20,000 views of my videos on YouTube. 10,000 in the last six months. Thanks to all the people who watched them, the 27 people who have subscribed, the 90 comments and the 119 thumbs up. Too bad about the one thumb down. :-(
This post kind of stretches the boundaries of "a blog about my music projects", but what the heck. Let the blog police come after me.
If you've read my posts with videos, you know that I've been frustrated with the process and the quality. So I've been experimenting and I think I'm getting closer to finding the equipment, software and skills to produce better video.
The clip below is one such experiment. I shot it with a borrowed Canon HV-20 mounted on my own home-brew, totally ghetto steadi-cam. It was a very windy day, so there's plenty of camera movement, but not nearly as much as if I had shot hand-held.
I captured the video to hard-drive on my studio desktop computer because it's the only computer I have with a firewire card and a fast enough disk to handle the realtime HD transfer. Unfortunately, the only software I have on that machine that can capture HD is an old free version of Pinnacle. Strangely, Pinnacle can capture the HD stream and save it to an HD mpeg file, but then doesn't recognize the file format and can't edit it. The only software I have that can edit the HD file is Movie Maker HD on my Vista Ultimate machine (which doesn't have a firewire card). But my expectations of doing video on computer have been so reduced that I'm actually quite happy with this rigamarole of a process!
You'll have to go to vimeo to view the clip in HD because vimeo (understandably) doesn't allow embedding of HD. If you watch the video here in the blog, it will play in standard definition.
Leave a comment if you like it or if it makes your brain bleed. (And let me know what browser you're using, especially if it looks hinky).
And be sure to check out the new "Labels" menu below the "Blog Archive" on the right. I went back and put labels on all the old blog posts. Now you can jump directly to all posts with audio, or all posts about recitals, etc.
I used to play the piano a lot. Then came the usual combination of distractions: school, work, life. I always made time for music, but the Big Hand and Twice the Usual recording commitments ate up my whole music time budget. In August this year, I finally convinced myself to call the Twice the Usual album "finished", and was starting to wonder what musical pursuit would take its place. The Antonini family reunion would give me the answer.
The Antoninis are a very musical family, my uncle Marty the most conspicuously so. At any gathering someone will eventually say "Hey Marty, go get your piano!", and he'll show up 15 minutes later with a PA. He's probably the most entertaining entertainer I've ever seen. His ability to perform on demand is inspiring, and I realized that I regretted not being able to play when asked. In spite of all the time I've spent in the studio over the last ten years, I didn't have a single thing on any instrument that I could sit down and play from beginning to end. So I vowed to "learn how to play the piano again."
In this next part of the Art Facts blog I'll write about my reintroduction to the piano, and the path back to playing in public. And I'll post some recordings along the way, too.
I've avoided the blogosphere long enough. Time to foray, eh.
I guess it's been about twenty years that I've been lumping my "artistic" exercises under the name Art Facts; art-facts.com has been alive for the last seven (though "alive" may be a stretch).
Anyway.
I hope to post here irregularly to document my musical projects. It's self-indulgent, but I expect the site to go unnoticed. Does that make it a wash?
Posts
