What do you get when you try to arrange an orchestral piece for the piano? A pianostration! :-).
And lately I’ve been making pianostrations of one of my favorite musicals — Maybe Happy Ending (“MHE”) [official site]
My most recent one is of the lovely jazz crooner, “A Sentimental Person”:
All my earlier pianostrations are in this playlist, including so far:
Next up:
- “The Way That it Has to Be” — have learned it, now I need to record it
- Revised recording of “When You’re in Love” — because I biffed a few bits and am looking forward to making a more faithful-to-the-original version 🙂
- “Maybe Happy Ending” — have just started pianostrating it and am super-duper excited to record this one. Such a beautiful and grand piece!
Want to be notified when I post new pianostrations? You can subscribe to my YT channel; for the foreseeable future, most of my new posts there will likely be MHE-related :).
And also feel free visit my overarching Music’ing page… which includes links to a mishmash of my playing / composing / music accomplishments.
In case you’re especially interested in my MHE musicmaking, here’s some info & my thoughts on this ongoing fun project 🙂
- I’ve been doing all the arranging by ear… just listening to the songs again and again.
- Pros: lovely music to listen to! fun to figure things out!
- Cons: oof, the earworming! Also, I’m not sure to what extent my nextdoor neighbor is appreciating my practicing. And it’s sometimes frustrating trying to fit so many wonderful lines and rhythms into two hands.
- If I had to roughly outline the time it takes for each piece…
- Half hour to be able to play through the entire song pretty roughly
- 2-3 hours to refine it, figuring out how to more faithfully represent the melody, harmonies, rhythms
- Of that, typically 90% of that is spent on just 10% of the piece… understanding some confusing chords, assessing how to craft a more complex rhythm or multi-singer interplay, etc.
- 3-7 hours to practice it so that it becomes second nature
- The 90/10 rule almost always still applies! There’s often one arpeggiated section or a bit where I have to try to tackle a rhythm while not overshadowing the melody, etc. But mostly, I find that there are always a few challenging spots that I keep messing up on when recording, so I gotta try, try, try, try, try again 😮 (luckily for my neighbors, this part is with headphones!)
- And about the equipment used…
- Roland LX-17 digital piano, an oldie but goodie! While the piano sound is no longer state of the art, unfortunately, it’s easier to record from than a traditional piano.
- Macbook Air with…
- Logic Pro for recording the audio
- iPhone 15 Pro for capturing the video
- iMovie for stitching the audio and video together
I’d love to get your questions and feedback in the comments below and I’m happy to update this page with more details based on your input 🙂
Among other things, perhaps I can start adding more nerdy musical details about the making each piece specifically if there’s interest.