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Yet another improv, i worry im boring people with these! I'll stop doing it soon, I.promise! I've started writing down my compositions/improvs again. I have a couple of minuets I'll upload soon, I just get so distracted when I sit at the piano. I've composed, via improv, a piano sonata in C major, I was thinking of the third movement when I improvised this. It reminds me of Haydn, I want the third movement to be light hearted and playful because the second movement I composed is in c minor and I use every trick up my sleeve to pull on the heart strings. I wish I recorded myself playing it, I worry my memory of it could get corrupted because it has more complex counterpoint. The first movement is like a piano concerto and is full of flashy runs in both hands. It has a Mozartian air and I use some of his signature moves but it has enough of me in it so it's not a cringey pastiche. Well I hope not! The improv here is a 'first run' so it's full of hesitation and mistakes but it made me smile when I listened back to it so I thought I'd upload it, I've been quiet for a few days so why not. Cuckoo!

For the past 18 months I've not been active much musically. I'm back now and bursting with ideas. This piece began as a minuet but ended up an improvised fantasy. I composed the minuet ages ago and recently had access to my piano so I hit record and played it. I was playing from memory and had dumb fingers where Ive been away from the piano for so long and I forgot how to play. So it begins hesitantly and annoyingly I forgot how to play the coda of the minuet so began improvising from that point onward. I transitioned to the trio but it sounded nothing like a trio as I improvised but I liked the ideas I was coming up with and carried on. By the time the minuet returns at the end I found my confidence again. Cant believe I earned the 12 year badge, has it really been that long?! Are there many others still here who joined back then?

Hello! I wanted to share a recording of myself improvising at the keyboard last November (my working title comes from the date) and ask for help with a certain issue. Improvising often feels more honest and pure to me than formal composition where I have time to overthink things, and I feel like I'm handing over a piece of my soul, but at this point the background noise is really my main obstacle from making it public on SoundCloud. I attempted to use the noise gate in my DAW, Cubase, which either dulled the entire recording down or muted *all* sound for an interval of time. Does anyone have experience with this feature or have other tools/methods to recommend that are compatible with Cubase or can be done entirely on an outside platform? I do not have much experience eliminating noise in recordings. While I've encountered tools to suppress constant low-level noise, here it is in sharp spikes over softer, sustained notes. I am also prepared for the possibility that not much can be done for it and open to re-recording it if so. 🙂 I look forward to hearing from more experienced editors. Thank you so much!

Recording is amazing. I know, right?

Guten Tag! This is one of the projects I have been working on this semester! Feel free to check out the concept behind it at this blog post: Composition Notebook: "Morning Birds" - the story. What I am attaching for ya'll is the full score (which includes the cues for the three different flute parts, but not the actual parts), one of the flute parts (so you can see what they look like), a MIDI rendering of all the orchestra and flute parts combined, and a MIDI rendering of just the orchestra part (Titled "Three Violin Version..."). One of the flaws of the combined MIDI file is that the flute parts are made up of several short fragments/'bird calls',as you will see in the attached flute part, and the players will be improvising which bird call they play when. In other words, it will be a much more organic process than a computer just playing them all in order, as happens in the recording. I think the MP3 of everything combined sounds pretty terrible and clamorous which is not at all the intent of the piece. I suspect that this chaos will be lessened considerably when real players are performing this. If anyone has experience writing this sort of thing, I would really appreciate any advice you'd have to offer. Also, I am happy to hear comments from anyone about this piece, whether they be about the orchestral writing, the special effects, or anything else. Thank you and enjoy!

Hi! I'm new to this site, and I'm not here for myself. I joined this site for my friend who is an amazing pianist and insane at improvisation. He is very good, and what I upload here, with his permission, is pure improvisation. I think that if you give the music a nice amount of feedback, he will have more motivation to compose and improvise more, and I will upload more here. Please listen closely to these audio files from my friend and please give me/him some feedback on his playing. The feedback can be either good or bad. I just want him to be heard, and given feedback to. Piano improv. 2.mp3Piano improv. 3.mp3 Piano improv. 1.mp3 Thanks!!

Hello everyone, Here is a little piece I wrote over the holidays. The theme is actually a mix of 2 themes by Rachmaninoff combined into one, from the 2nd movement of his Piano Sonata no. 2 in B-flat minor, and his Prelude in B minor. It is a short piece, only lasting 6 minutes. I might add another piece to the opus number later on, but in the mean time, it will remain as is. Here is my performance on Youtube: I hope you all enjoy. 🙂 Theo

Wanted to share an improv from the past year or two. Curious to know what you guys think. Technique, melody, etc. Thanks for listening!

Hello guys! So for most of my life i've sat down at pianos and improvised. A couple years ago I got a phone and started to record these sessions. I've never really publicly "published" these recordings, but since my parents and musical friends say I should, here's one! This is one of my more recent sessions... I record anywhere from 1-3 a day! I only started taking piano lessons last year so my technique is super primitive Any advice for me as an improviser? Are these any good?

Improvisation on ‘In The Air Tonight’ I always wanted to do a cover of Phil Collins ‘In The Air Tonight’.. I think it is an extremely powerful sounding song. It has a haunting quality to it, it almost sounds like it might be a ‘holy’ song. Part of that is a low drone of A through out the song.. It ‘holds’ the piece. As I worked with the song, I realized how important the quality of Phil Collin’s voice and the lyrics were to the piece.. He has a rather plain, slightly nasal quality. But it adds to the emotion. It is an ‘everyday voice, an ‘anybody’s voice’.. He also sings the same melodic phrase quite a bit, which adds to it’s hypnotic quality. Without the lyrics and his voice, the melody wasn’t as attention grabbing. So I took considerable leeway with the melody and let a few instruments take turns sharing and improvising on the melody. I also continued to explore the avenue of sound design. Many of the instruments at the bottom of the score are only one staff, because they really don’t have a real designated pitch center.. And I could never fit all those staffs on one page. I searched for, created, and modified interesting (to me) sound patches, from Kontakt libraries, UVI Libraries, and a number of virtual instruments. I also layered some of the parts, with 2 or 3 different patches, at softer volumes, to create a richer tapestry on the one track. I tried to juxtapose a few traditional instruments, with totally ‘unreal’ instruments, and sound collages which I created. I did a fair amount of audio processing, using various audio mutation plug-ins to change the sounds and instruments into something different. I am trying to use created sound/ sound collage as an instrument in itself. It is more the strange harmonics, and processed rhythms to create an emotion. The Acoustic Guitar picking part is a function of the ‘Sunbird Guitar’ by UVI. It plays a picking pattern to blocked chords, hence I could not notate it properly.. Like wise there are a couple of patches, which have soft arpeggios build in (some of the UVI libraries) so without the MIDI out, there is not a proper way to notate them.. (maybe in next life, I’ll have perfect pitch).. This and the last few pieces I’ve done, are more an exploration in an area I want to explore. Eventually I hope to compose a huge piece with pieces more traditional (for me) and more exploratory.

unfinished improvisation

Hi everyone! This is a kind of a minimalist piano piece of mine. It§ s called "Rain" because of the free form and due to the fact that except for the recurring theme, it is heavily improvised and it is supposed to remind of raindrops. I hope you will like it!

A small prelude written for my English class - background music for a model based on the setting from A. Huxley's "Brave New World". In this composition, I tried to reproduce the cheap and ignorant, grotesque cheerfulness of Huxley's bizarre world of artificiality. Also, I thought that the concept of all-seeing eye would fit the dystopian nightmare. The pillar of this prelude is my loose improvisation in A major - one of the most happy and cheery keys, in my opinion. Thank you for listening!

Two improvisations I recorded yesterday. They are contrasting (in my opinion) - let me know what you think! I recommend listening to the "Soft" one first. Soft.MP3 Hard.MP3

Today I had a lecture on the role and meaning of improvisation in terms of composition, which proved to be very interesting. So I figured whilst I was here I would throw the question to you fine people. So in relation to composition, what is Improvisation?

Hey... I'd like your opinion on my performance on this style, I'm seeking job as pianist in Restaurants or Hotels but no luck so far, they have musicians already, still, there are more places I can go to offer my services.. There is not much Jazz in Mexico, there are tons of so-called musicians with keyboards playing a melody along midi background, sometimes the piano is there but they prefer to carry their heavy stuff (bad sign). My performance in these videos is already good enough for my city, but you people from other places, specially American guys, even New York guys, I bet you know pianist play way better than this, so I'd like you to tell me how could I improve this, all I want is $300 pesos (like $25 dollars) per hour, I'll be happy with that. I come from Classical world, I have taken these piece from fakebooks, no complete score, I try to make the best arrangement I can, is always kinda improvised, not 100% defined, each time sounds a bit different, I also can introduce sections in the middle and make the piece longer etc... I'm not yet in full control of this style, you can notice at the end, the last note, my finger...I'm a bit nervous :D (also I was cold) YC Shoutbox sound, chord progression at the end :D, it is not officially called The YCSB ending. I think I got nervous at the end too, kinda lost track of harmony, (I can't blame temperature on that) so what do you think ?, just replace in your head the casio sound with a real piano, my room with a much better ambient. (Note, Digital pianos resonance is way weaker than real pianos, it automatically forces me to add more notes, to avoid emptiness, I usually play less stuff on a real piano.)