A bit of a diary entry: I had another video call with a friend which was way less awkward than the last, which gave me some social confidence though I'm still paranoid of being noticed and judged, and I composed six short piano pieces this week - and have an album of 18 more from between 2012 and 2019 - but it's a shame that's not really a marketable thing that people would care about!
On Social Confidence
∞ I recently wrote about an awkward video call I did with a friend ∞; one of only a handful I've ever done, and the first in many months. My social anxiety convinced me it'd gone so poorly she wouldn't want to do another, but a few days later she said she was in a dark place mentally, said she needed someone to talk to, which transformed my insecurity into the desire to be useful, and I suggested we do another, which we did a couple of days ago.
It went much better! We talked for four hours and it all went smoothly; I cringed about a whole lot less after, and ended the call feeling a kind of social contentment that's very alien to me these days. It's nice being able to put a smile on another person's face and to see that in real time. Plus she outright said she felt much better afterwards and seemed to mean it, so that provided evidence against the "I'm repulsive and nobody could possibly like me" thoughts that have made up the fundamental assumptions about myself for a long while now.
We talked about doing it regularly since we agreed it'd help us both, but I suppose I don't need much social contact to feel exhausted, so I'm not desperately hoping for daily chats or anything like that. Once every so often would be enough for me!
Or I suppose I'm saying that because I've become overly emotionally dependent on other people before, and it's never gone well, so I want to avoid that this time...
I've wondered in the past whether to do YouTube videos of some kind - even if it's just my voice for visual/verbal weekly dev logs - and this brought those wonderings back up. Maybe, at some point? We'll see.
I've also been seeing posts on various indiedev subreddits fairly often over the past week; I subscribed to a bunch a while back, but only usually checked r/all so I never saw their posts, but recently due to the UFO stuff I've been checking my subscribed feed (or whatever) every day instead. There are many impressive solo-dev games posting there every day and it's intimidating! But I'm also warming up to the idea of posting there myself, so maybe I'll muster up the courage to do that one day where I'll get 2 upvotes maybe and 0 comments and then I'll feel horribly discouraged and give it all up to become a door-to-door dildo salesman. MAYBE.
Sometimes that feed recommends subreddits the algorithm thinks I'll be interested in, and today I was shown one called ∞ r/thespoonyexperiment ∞, which rung a bell but I wasn't sure why. It seems to be based around someone called TheSpoonyOne, whose name I vaguely remember from years ago, but not who he was or what he did. Something like the equivalent of modern youtubers, media creators, something like that? I don't know! I checked Wikipedia briefly and that's the impression I'm getting, but it feels like the sort of thing with this whole mythos around it that I'm not going to ∞ grok ∞ in a few minutes (also I can't be bothered trying). I've occasionally seen subreddits for youtubers that give me a similar feeling.
It looks like this guy's severely depressed (or bipolar, Wikipedia says) and fell from grace, and I don't know whether the posts are playfully joining his own jokes about that or whether they're just outright making fun of him, as old fans disgusted by what he's become, perhaps (I'm getting the impression from a quick skim that it's the latter). Either way, I get concerned whenever I see things like this about doing anything to attract attention to myself. I'd rather just be obscure!
Piano Miniatures
Another (completely unrelated) thing I wanted to talk about is music composition, which is something I occasionally do for fun. I've primarily composed albums for my games, but I've also composed non-game stuff occasionally... though not as often as I'd like. I put much of the stuff I've composed over the years is ∞ on my Bandcamp page ∞ earlier this year, and there's a fair bit of it (I have a playlist of all of those albums which totals about 17 hours; 368 pieces), but my output's definitely died down since the initial explosion of creativity. I'm always waiting for the muse to strike so I can bring a new piece into being, but it's annoyingly rare, and most years I've only composed a handful of pieces, if that.
The next in the series of albums I was going to release is a collection of short piano 'Miniatures' that I composed between 2012 and 2019; there are 18, which says a lot about how prolific I haven't been. I've yet to post it though because I don't know how much anyone cares about these albums in general, and about the non-game ones in particular. I have the audio files, but I still need to make some cover art, which I keep putting off.
Here's one of the tracks in video (sheet music + audio) form:
I started playing the piano when I was about 16, but I'm not good at it, at all! For the first year or two, I was enthusiastic and my skills developed quickly, but I only had a handful of beginner lessons - and no grading exams - so I was mostly self-taught. I found and attempted to play a whole lot of sheet music, with varying success... but mostly what I found were either simplified versions of Classical pieces (which annoyed me because if I was to learn a piece at all, I'd rather it was the 'real thing' and not a reduction), or they were just way beyond my skill level. I still attempted the difficult ones, but never got beyond fumbling poorly through them.
Then my interest faded and I only ever dabbled aimlessly every few days or weeks, never really improving at all. I suspect this isn't an unusual relationship-with-an-instrument story!
The idea behind at least some of these piano pieces was to write things I could actually play, and which were complete in themselves rather than reductions. Composing them myself meant I was able to develop my composing skills at the same time, plus I was able to explore musical territory that spoke to me more than other more popular stuff (I like the Mixolydian mode, as I've said a few times, though it's only years after composing these pieces that I even realised what that was).
I like them a lot - they're all different, and explore some interesting little places - but they're fairly awkward to play, and they were composed so far apart that there's no real coherence between them. The album feels like a collection of miscellany, because it is.
A handful of times over the past couple of years, I've composed new, slightly longer and more complex piano pieces that I could actually play, and I've been trying to get into playing the piano more to practise them... with some success. I can actually play pieces I composed now! Not well, but I can kind of do it! It's something I've wanted for years, so there's some definite personal satisfaction there, like a long-held goal finally almost ticked off. Those are intended to be part of a different album - together with some instrumental pieces - that's also complete but which I've yet to upload to my Bandcamp due to assumptions about lack of interest.
But inspiration for those more recent piano pieces strikes months apart, unfortunately, so it's been a while since I had a new one to practice.
Last week, for whatever reason, I decided to try to compose a new piece every day! That's an intention I've had right from the time I started composing, and I think I've attempted it a few times over the years but it never lasts long. This time, I tried to revisit my 'Miniatures' idea, to try to compose some shorter piano pieces I could write and play without too much investment. Here's one of them:
I've composed six of these now - each distinct and about a couple of minutes long - and I love them a lot! I keep thinking I want to share them, or at least do something with them...
But I'm also acutely aware that my own pleasure comes from being their creator, and that this is hardly the sort of thing other people are actively looking to consume. They're soft, reflective, minimalistic; very different to the bombastic piano pieces people might be drawn to if they ever bothered to look into any piano music at all.
It's a shame, though, that I can't monetise these, since I can do six in a week whereas making a game takes months or years!
I can imagine young, new - or old, rusty - pianists maybe getting something out of playing short, colourful, not-too-difficult pieces... but I also assume such pianists instead just use the sorts of simple Classical stuff I did at the start, or adaptations of pop songs or other things they recognise and remember. Even if I wanted to play some obscure creator's personal music myself, I have no idea how I'd find it. There's just no obvious form of distribution.
(I'm speaking of a hypothetical "I" there; I could probably find some subreddits for composers or piano music, but I'm reluctant to do that because I feel like they'd all be better than me and it'd be discouraging.)
I'm subscribed to a couple of pianists on YouTube, but essentially all the pianists I see on there are focused around 'competence porn' - ∞ they're phenomenally skilled and the pieces they play are extremely complex ∞ - and I suspect the human performance aspect is very important to observers. People seem to be more interested in performance than composition in general (music 'artists' become famous, while the music they perform is often composed by relative unknowns; see ∞ this person ∞ for one example, or ∞ Elvis ∞ for another) just because it's far more in-your-face and I suppose directly relatable to their familiar experience.
While I can kind of play these pieces myself, I have no way to cleanly record them, and my skills are poorer than the computer so I prefer to just use generated performances. The structure of the music - not its performance - is what's interesting to me personally.
I might upload the albums at some point anyway (once I've found the time and energy to do cover art), and I might also put the videos like these ones somewhere... I was wondering if anyone would be interested in those on Patreon, or if not that, then maybe I could put them on YouTube where they'd get maybe 10 views and a comment complaining that they're not MARDEK or something.
Only-vaguely-relatedly, I saw an indie dev I follow on Twitter mention doing an interview with a YouTube channel recently... ∞ where I see the videos mostly have sub-100 views ∞. I suppose most videos on there get barely any views, though that's a sad fact if true.
I should also mention that I'm paranoid of exposing these to scrutiny and getting critical comments, which saps all the joy out of creating them. That's the main reason I've got quite a bit of music to myself, unreleased... though I suppose the more likely reaction is complete apathy, disinterest, which is also deflating in a different way.
Anyway, I've been enjoying composing and playing these pieces, so even if nobody else cares to listen to or play them, that's not nothing! Plus I'm learning more with each one, so that should help my composing for games too. I feel way more confident about music theory stuff than I did in 2012! Feels like I knew nothing then... (The analysis on the 2012 sheet music was done recently, and it seems from doing it that I did at least have some vague intuitive idea of what I was doing, though. So that's interesting.)
8 COMMENTS
Tama_Yoshi82~3Y
I don't think you should worry too much about whether you like your pieces "because you made them." You've already gotten quite a lot of praise for your music, so it's not all "in you head," and you're already acutely aware of how very self-critical you are, so if it passes THAT threshold, that has to mean something! I also like what I make, and the degree to which I like it has to do with time and experience; I hate things I made when I was just beginning, but less for those things I made when I was more experienced. What you're doing is great and the fact you're so invested means you'll also get better! If you getting better is what causes you to hate your work in the future, I think it's a fair tradeoff.
Non-artists tend to judge things differently, because they just go with what they're familiar with. There's a lot less merit to their opinion, since it's basically just random noise. I wouldn't beat myself up for it.
What classical pieces have you been playing? My relationship with playing the piano sounds similar to yours. I've become much better at improv and just "fudging" the pieces I want to play, rather than thoroughly coordinate the different voices/hands of a piece. That's because learning a piece is hard, and memorizing it exactly is also bad if you want to return back to it months later. I also tend to "get the idea" and just start assuming everything else since it sounds good enough... which probably doesn't contribute to me being very rigorous at all.
I learned to play Gymnopédie No 1, Gnossienne 1, Morceaux en Forme de Poire (intro) + one of the later quieter parts (all of which are Erik Satie, the Morceaux I still forget and fumble when I haven't played them in a while, and technically I never learned Gymnopédie past the first half, I just fudge the chords past that point as they're rather odd chords). I also play Prelude in E Minor and Moonlight Sonata (although again, I forget after a while), and like a lot of video game music, obviously. "Mallow's sad song" from Mario RPG is one I return to often.
The two most recent pieces I learned were Philip Glass' "Opening" (learning the polyrhythm was a bit hard, but fun) and Experience by Ludovico Einaudi (I really don't have fun playing this one, and I've probably forgotten most of it already. I learned it for my girlfriend). Both pieces are easy, though!
I also play harder pieces, but usually not well, and usually not completely; they're more artifacts of times when I was way more motivated. Some of these pieces are so outside the range of styles I usually play that I can't even improv something that sounds similar. A piece I often return back to, despite the fact I can't play both the bass and main line, is the Submerged City theme from Super Castlevania 4. It's very weird, but also jazzy, and learning it really made me "see" a different way to think of playing and doing improv.
I also wish I could play all of Wingman from Pilotwings 64; I really like the Blues/Funk vibes. It's really its own genre. Fudging jazzy chords is also easier since they tend to sound more alike...
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Tobias 1115~3Y
I like my compositions a lot - even the early stuff - and I think I've grown into a decent composer, but my feelings about others' feelings relate to the social influence - or potential profit - these things might (or rather won't) potentially have. Whether or not other people like them doesn't bother me so much, but it's disappointing knowing for a fact that the time I spend on music like this isn't getting me closer to a point of financial stability. It'd be hugely different for anything approached as just some hobby to share with a few friends without any grander hopes for it. But my lack of a stable salary makes me wonder and worry about how to monetise everthing. I think this is common for online creators trying to make a living from their creations; I saw Matt Roszak tweeting about similar feelings (being unable to do anything without worrying about how to monetise it) a while back, for example.
I never really thought about it this way until recently, but the hardest part of learning any piece of music is the memorisation. It's like trying to fully remember a speech, with even less room for fudging details if you're a stickler for accuracy like I am. I can kind of sight-read intermediate pieces (with a lot of pauses), but I rarely devote the necessary time to memorise them so I learn very few (then I forget them quickly anyway and wonder what the point was!).
I was playing stuff like Gymnopedie and Moonlight Sonata (first movement; the third is slightly harder) within my first few eager months of having a piano, and I find Einaudi's stuff very accessible too so I've played a fair amount of that. This Turret in the Woods was directly inspired by the structure of some of his pieces, from what I recall. I have some full sheet music books of his, and I notice that most of his music uses the same left hand patterns and repeated chords; it's very simple, and I've wondered many times how he became popular (without ever really looking into it).
Maybe my favourite piece my him was one I found in one of those books, called... "La nascita della cose segrete", apparently; I just dug up the pdf and attempted to play it, and I can pretty much sightread that. I liked it because its structure is different to much of his other stuff... though I also notice it's in Mixolydian mode, which I apparently like - and naturally compose in - a lot but only understood that as of quite recently.
I don't know how much you know about sheet music, but Mixolydian is what you get when you play as if in C major but change the Bs into Bbs, as a simplified example. It's what I usually improvise in even when I aim to do something different.
(If you change the Fs to F#s instead, you'll be in Lydian, which is what The Simpsons theme is in. FUN FACT.)
Other than that, I used to play video game stuff; I liked the Final Fantasy Piano Collections because they're adaptations written with the piano in mind rather than just straight reductions of the pieces. Those inspired the Piano Collections I made of MARDEK music. Maybe I should attempt to play those Final Fantasy Piano Collections again...
Oh! About a year ago, I also signed up for a thing called Flowkey with the hope that'd help me improve, or at least give me pieces to play. It has a lot of classical stuff, though annoyingly a lot of it is reductions, even at the highest difficulty; Clair de Lune, for example, omits the majority of the piece (including the most famous bit), which is annoying (also, I could play Clair de Lune a few years ago). It also has a lot of pop music that I suppose a mainstream audience would be interested in, plus some video game stuff... several pieces of which are from Undertale, which fills me with much joy and absolutely no creative envy every time I see them, of course.
1
Tama_Yoshi82~3Y
It's funny how you only mentioned the first and 3rd movement of Moonlight Sonata. Nobody ever talks of the 2nd movement, it's the one nobody cares about.
Claire de Lune is probably the far-end of the difficulty I could play, I don't think I could learn it without spending very large amounts of time on it, and then would probably forget most of it after months. Not a very nice way to learn music!!
The theory I haven't assimilated is probably what changes most the way I play compared to you. I don't sight-read at all, I never spent enough time to really get it in a way that isn't painful. As a result, I don't think of specific notes but generally think more about a visual keyboard, which is what my eyes see most of the time. It's more difficult to remember terms like the names of specific scales, but I do use scales mostly intuitively since they're just a set of notes on the keyboard. It makes it more difficult to talk about music, though.
It's very annoying when the pieces are reduction! I have a project I'd like to code eventually, which would solve that as well as allow me to sight-read more efficiently. The idea is to make a self-adjusting music sheet, which is semi-randomly generated (so it can never be memorized), and adjusts its difficulty depending on how well the player performs. That way, the player is always playing "live" and always playing something at his level of skill. It turns the music-based application into a more reactive application, similar to Guitar Hero and the like, except the learned skill is MUCH MORE useful outside of the application.
1
Tobias 1115~3Y
It's been annoying me recently that even if I do put in a lot of time to learn something, I forget it after like a week! Makes me wonder whether proper pianists ever have some repertoire of pieces they can just play on a whim, or whether some revision is always necessary before a performance even if they've played it many times before...
I'm primarily a composer rather than a pianist, and I work in Sibelius so understanding notes and their placements on the staves has become (somewhat) natural to me because of that. I wonder though how many people are even using sheet music these days; I've got the impression a lot of people just use youtube videos or apps with notes as scrolling blocks in some kind of midi track format!
That sounds like a great and useful idea! I've used some apps to practice sight-reading that work similarly, but without randomness or adjustments based on skill level. I can see a whole lot of value in something like that!
I've had a not-entirely-dissimilar idea myself for a while, for a program where I can load midi versions of pieces, have them display as sheet music (or something close to it), and then it'd receive midi piano input to check for my accuracy playing. Any mistakes would be marked, and every time I play a section with any mistakes, the tempo would be reduced by something like 10%, down to maybe 50%. Playing a section without errors would increase the tempo by 10%. It's kind of what I've been doing anyway while trying to learn pieces, but having some way to automate and gamify it might help motivate me to learn more! Though of course I need to find the motivation to work on something like that at some point... which is elusive!
1
bkjnt2019~3Y
I don't have anything technical to say or any advice, I just want to say that I really enjoyed listening to the piano pieces you shared here. They made my day a little better.
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Tobias 1115~3Y
I generally don't actually want or like advice, but I very much appreciate comments like this! Knowing at least someone appreciates these makes the effort feel worthwhile!
0
Travl9~3Y
Let me just say I really enjoyed the music pieces you shared. I would also really like to hear the others that haven't released yet.
I myself prefer the music track far more than the performance. I am not a musician myself. (though I would like to be one someday) I just find it nice to have some good background music while I am sitting at my desk.
I am also optimistic that there are many others who would also like to hear your music. Whether or not you decide to publish your tracks, I just want you to know that I am really grateful for your music.
Thanks,
Travl
1
Tobias 1115~3Y
I appreciate hearing this! My music means a lot to me and takes a lot of time and effort, but it's a shame few - if any - other people would hear or appreciate it. Hopefully I'll get around to putting up the several other albums I have, at some point!
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