Stepping On the Clouds: How to Play Southern Gospel Style

Click HERE to go to the original blog post with free downloadable Midi and Sheet Music.

     In the past week, the final piece of the puzzle dropped into place.  Music Notation 4 was the finishing touch.  In the original Grace Notes, there were multiple elements with each new song:

• The actual video, playing the song on piano (Yamaha DG-640 back then)
• A How To video, with sheet music and animated keyboard showing what keys to play
• A free downloadable Midi file of the song
• A free downloadable version of the sheet music

    That took a full toolbox of software (plus a keyboard).  Over the years, the Yamaha quit working for me, and was replaced with an M-Audio Hammer 88.  It's a beautiful keyboard with a great feel, but has no built-in audio.  Strictly a Midi controller.  It came with Ableton as the DAW.  The main computer was my Swiss army knife, but Ableton didn't play well with the other installed software.  It took getting a dedicated laptop to make Ableton and the Hammer 88 work consistently.  And even then, I wound up needing an external audio driver (Also M-Audio, as are the speakers.)  Ableton creates the initial Midi, Notation Musician cleans it up a bit.
    Originally, I used the Flip line of digital video recorders, and later a more sophisticated digital camera.  Eventually, cell phones improved to the point I now shoot the videos on my phone.  Nothing special, just a slightly outdated Android.  Got a cheap mini tripod from Amazon that has flexible legs.  It can wrap around handy furniture or fixtures so I don't have to worry about getting an odd angle or knocking it off a shelf.  Bandicam was my screen video recording software.  Did a good job then... does a good job now.  I've kept it through at least three computers, and it just keeps on working.
    For regular video editing, I use HitFilm Express.  My needs are simple.  I mainly use it to replace the live piano audio from the original video (with all the household noises, barking dogs, etc...) with a WAV audio file generated by Ableton.  I sync the audio and video by the simply watching my fingers on the piano, and aligning the audio to match the movement.  It's like having my own private sound studio, and easier than you'd think.

    The How-To videos were made using Midi Sheet Music, a freeware program that hasn't been updated in years and isn't compatible with Ableton's exported Midi files.  It converted Midi to sheet music, plus could play the sheet music notation with an animated piano keyboard.  And it divided the single-track keyboard into 2-track treble/clef sheet music.  Those were the only things it did, but it did them all-in-one and was dead-simple to use.  It wasn't pretty, but it did the job.
    Now I use Notation Musician to output PDF files of the sheet music.  It also splits the Midi files into two tracks.  Didn't have to have that feature, but it makes the sheet music look cleaner.  I can play the midi files and follow along in the sheet music onscreen, but lacks the animated piano keyboard.
    Lastly, I use Midiano to actually play the song (with the animated keyboard) for the How To video.  It animates the sheet music across the screen, has a gorgeous animated piano at the bottom, and drops played notes visually down the screen to show which keys are coming up in sequence.  Tons of customizing available.  Absolutely free.  Midiano is a sparkling example of brilliant design.  It's a fabulous learning tool, with more features than you can shake a stick at.  Did I mention free?
    I highly recommend Midiano.  Download my midi file (or any Midi file), load it into Midiano, and you can experience a whole new way of learning piano music.  It even waits for you to hit the next notes, before moving on.  You can see it in action in the video above.

    There's more here and there, but these are the basic tools I use.  Music Notation 4 was the last big piece.  With it, I can include the sheet music, and can replicate everything the old Grace Notes blog used to provide.  Since it's been so long between posting the actual 'live' piano video, and then today doing the how to video, I'm putting the new video here on this page.  Going forward, all four elements will be on a single post, so you don't have to search for every separate piece.

    

Google Blogger Housecleaning: Customizing Blogger

    Writing kind of a trivial post today.  At least, it's trivial in the large scheme of things.  It was a big deal for me, anyway.  :^)

    Back in January when the idea of starting Grace Notes back up was gaining momentum, there was a huge speed bump that just about shut things down before it even had a chance to start.  The "cookie consent" situation.  There were a log of changes to manage, new things to learn.  Last time I was paying (a lot!) for hosting and using Wordpress.  This time we're taking the budget express.  Google Blogger is free, and you can have a BUNCH of blogs if you really want to.  Google charges $12 per year for the URL domain, and $12 for Google Office.

    The URL name is a compromise.  It's not the original one for Grace Notes, but it is my overarching URL ever since Galaxy Quest came out.  Crewman6 was the redshirt who lived, and it's always been an inspirational name for me.  Google Office gives me a custom email, more storage for whatever files I use on the blog.  Some other benefits I haven't looked into yet.  Pretty much, this is everything I need to manage Grace Notes.  WordPress was a great blogging platform, and was more versatile than Blogger.  But it was a heck of a lot more expensive to maintain, and the hosting company just kept leapfrogging the rates up every year.  As things stand, I pay about $156 per year for this setup.  The old Grace Notes, with Word Press, hosted on a proper site... was costing nearly $500 per year by the time I pulled the plug.  Blogger is far more cost-efficient for me.

    At some point I'll turn Adsense on, but it's not a big goal here.  Grace Notes cost much more to maintain than it ever made me last time around.  If it can pay the $12 per month fee this time, I'll call it a successful hobby and enjoy it.

    Now we get to today's subject.  To properly manage the cookie consent requirements, I had to paste some code into the Blogger theme.  I also pasted in some custom lines for a couple of features that weren't easily available on Blogger.  Not really a skill of mine, but I did manage to follow a couple of guides.  Afterward, the initial menus for Theme management were gone.  There was a comment about some features not being available now.  I took that to mean I could no longer change the advanced features of my theme, without reloading the base version, making my changes, then re-inserting whatever custom codes needed to be done manually.  For a few months I looked for other theme templates off-Blogger, but didn't find any that seemed worth changing the whole blog for.

     With that in mind, I've been leaving a lot of 'tidying up' undone for months.  Mainly the link colors, and making a custom Banner. Woke up this morning, and it felt like today was the day to finally fix all that.  Found some websites that gave pointers on changing the link colors and sat down to puzzle them out.  The first one wanted me to start off on the Theme tab.  As usual, the first line read "Theme Preview is currently unavailable."

   

    If you're familiar with Blogger, at this point you've probably realized I've been mistaken this whole time.  The ability to customize my theme was always there.  As was the Advanced options.  Maybe something changed, maybe I just read it wrong.  I was clicking the down-arrow on the orange button to get the drop-down menu.  Took me ages to realize I just had to click on the orange button ON THE WORD "Customize!!" in order to get to the customization options. Now that I know, fixing the link colors was very easy.  

    It was a bit of work to get the banner done, but at least it was legitimate work, not a figment of my own imagination.  My previous keyboard was a Yamaha DG-640, and was a grayish-silver color.  That worked really well against the black background of the blog screen.  The Hammer 88 was more difficult.  A black body on a black background doesn't stand out a lot.  I played with it, even tried to use an external image for the background, but it didn't come out perfect.  It will stand for now, I do like it a lot.  But some day in the future, I'd like to have better lighting so the keys will be a clean white. Today's lighting was partly sunlight from a window, partly incandescent bulbs from a ceiling fan light, and the keys aren't consistently white.

    It's been a learning process, and a matter of finding the right software all over the internet.  I started with PixLR, used Irfanview, and tried several online tools before getting something that worked.  At the moment, I'm calling it a day, and an improved banner will have to be a project for another day.

Used Laptop for the Hammer-88: USB Problems

     Just an update based on a simple fix for a long-standing problem.  Going way back, I originally had one very good desktop to do everything.  It's 6 or 7 years old now, and still good, but no longer great.  Over the years, some things started conflicting with others.  The usual victim was system audio.  

    This caused the biggest problem with Ableton Live Lite and M-Audio's Hammer-88 keyboard.  Sometimes the audio drivers would quit working randomly.  The  most consistent and annoying villain was when Microsoft did a Windows "update/upgrade."  EVERY SINGLE TIME.  I only know a couple of swear words, but I've used them many many times at Windows updates.

(Warning - Upcoming Rant)
    The problem could sometimes be fixed easily (usually the random occurences.)  Other times (looking at YOU, Microsoft...) it could take days or weeks to get the audio to working reliably.  Sometimes it took so long, another update would come out just days later and we'd start all over again.
    Helpful Hint:  This website provides a link to a trouble-shooter that could fix most of the audio problems in moments:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fix-sound-or-audio-problems-in-windows-73025246-b61c-40fb-671a-2535c7cd56c8
    Yes, I'm aware it's a microsoft link.  That doesn't make me like them any better, since it was nearly always their OS updates that triggered the problem.  Just the same, this is the first thing I try when the audio stops working.  Click the link on the page and allow the app to test for problems.
    The weird thing is, it always reports "no problem found", and starts suggesting random things to try... but actually fixes the issue, at least most of the time.  So I click the "Open Get Help" button, let it do it's thing, then close the window after it reports failure.  And that's usually all it takes.
    Other times, it's as simple as checking "Sounds", going to the PlayBack Tab, and finding that the update has totally played havoc with speaker output assignments.  For some reason, it would reassign a new random output as the default.  Sometimes it would go to a legitimate speaker, like the one built-in to the monitor.  Other times it would choose options that had no output at all.  Re-setting the correct speakers as the default option will typically fix the audio, but sometimes it has to be reassigned as the default with every reboot.  Eventually it sticks, until the next system update.
    The worst ones... the mystery issues with no reliable fix... were the worst. This is part of the reason I quit playing.  It was so consistent, there were so many times I just wanted to 'play the piano' but couldn't, I gave up for a while.
(Rant Over)

A Dedicated Laptop
    In a final attempt to solve the problem, Monique found a used laptop on an Amazon lightning sale.  It's an older HP EliteBook.  Old enough it was originally sold with Windows 7 installed.  It's running Windows 10 now, but that's pushing things.  I don't install extraneous software.  Primarily Ableton, plus CCleaner and Irfanview.  And my favorite browser, Vivaldi. 
    Ableton 10 Live Lite - dedicated to the Hammer 88.
    CCleaner for it's utility toolkit and easy system cleaning. 
    Irfanview for the times I need a screenshot. 
    Vivaldi mainly because I used to use Google Drive to swap files.
    Our working space is tight, so the keyboard is on a wall-mounted shelving system, right beside the door.  It's easy to bump the keyboard while walking past it, and I thought maybe too many impacts caused the issue.

The Ultimate Fix: A USB Hub
    Eventually I realized the problem was the USB port the keyboard was attached to.  The laptop only has 3 USB ports, one to an external audio driver (the Air/Hub, by M-Audio), one to the keyboard, and one for the mouse. Not enough to go around with one having intermittent problems.  We had a 7-port powered hub.  I tried it, but for some reason when the laptop is powered down the hub still provides power to the Hammer 88 and to the mouse.  I didn't want the keyboard to be powered up non-stop all day long.  Seems like that would wear the electronics out faster.
    For about $15.00, we found a great USB hub on Amazon, by Sabrent.  It's powered, has 4 ports, and each port has a dedicated on/off switch, with a light so you know which ones are on.
    Now the keyboard and mouse are connected through the hub.  I also keep a USB memory stick on one port, for trading files between computers.  And the fourth port, just because it was available, provides power to a VCR-to-Computer converter.  Only the ports in use are powered up.  And when the laptop is turned off, I turn off the hub ports as well.  
    Now it works great.  I can play the keyboard reliably, at any time.  And turn the peripherals on/off as needed.  It's amazing when things function like you need them to!!

    With this setup it worked most of the time, but frustratingly there were still days it didn't.  Sometimes on a reboot, the laptop would not communicate with the keyboard.  Occasionally reconnecting the cable between them, but not always.  I started worrying that after all these years of not getting to use it, maybe the keyboard was aging, connections failing, who knows. 

The Technical Side of Grace Notes: Creating the Video and Sharing the Midi Files

     Yesterday marked a huge milestone here.  I finally posted my first brand new page of my own arrangement on piano, with a downloadable midi file of the piano arrangement.  It's been months in the process, learning and relearning all the associated elements. Writing this post is both a celebration... and my crib notes on the general process, in case I forget how to do it all again.  :^)

    I use M-Audio's Hammer 88 to play the songs.  I'm a strictly 'play-it-by-ear' type, so there's no music notation, no hours scribbling my music on notes.  Just sounding out different ways of playing, trying alternatives, and bit by bit designing an arrangement that appeals.  Once the idea is in my head, the hard part is memorizing that arrangement, and practicing until I can play the song (nearly) perfectly.  

    I'm in my 60's, and Covid really messed up my focus and comprehension.  It literally took 3 months to be ready to record.  Then stage fright kicks in.  Hours of playing/recording on Sunday.  More hours on Monday.  Tuesday I sat down, did a practice run-through, and the second attempt was as close to perfect as I'll probably ever get.  So that's the video you see.  (The song in this case is "Stepping On The Clouds.")

   Ableton Live Lite 10 came free with the Hammer 88.  So that's how I play and record the music.  Nothing fancy.  Once Ableton was installed and working, and a few technical set-up issues resolved, it was ready.  To record, I click the round "Record" button, start playing.  When I make a mistake, click "Stop", then "Play", then "Stop".  From trial and error, this activates a blue bar on the midi recording track, which I can then click to make Ableton's notation window pop open.  Click anywhere on the notation (inside the window that just popped up).  Select All (hold down CTRL and type "A".)

    Then I hit the DEL key, and for good measure, also hit the Backspace key.  Now it's a clean slate again.  Click the "Record" button again, and start playing.  Once the whole song is recorded satisfactorily, stop the recording, open the notation window and select All again.  
        {Without selecting ALL, the EXPORT features stay grayed out and don't activate.}

Then, under the FILE dropdown menu, first save the entire process as an Ableton Set (.als file).  Next, still on the File Menu, select EXPORT Midi, and save the midi version of the song.  Lastly, STILL on the File Menu, select EXPORT Audio.  I like to save the file in a ".wav" file format.  Mp3 is more popular, but Wav plays back at a constant speed.  It's not compressed so you can reliably count on the bitrate being stable.  I set it at 44000, 32-bit, and select "Normalize."  It's best if you first set your audio levels to not go over 0 decibels.  If the audio levels go into the red zone, it's set too loud.

    If it's time to record the video as well, I like to start recording, and keep playing even when I make mistakes and have to start over. (Tripod tip: Make sure you're pointing at the piano and frame the image as nicely as you can.  Don't forget to remove unsightly elements like the trash can under the keyboard...)
So, don't stop recording the video.  Keep recording nonstop, through every attempt.  There's a clear visual cue because every restart, the Ableton track needs to be stopped and reset before starting to play again.  When a good recording is achieved, upload the video to your computer.  To find the beginning in-point when editing, start at the end of the video, and scrub backwards until you come to the starting point of your perfect rendition.  Delete all the 'bad' footage in front of that, trim the end a bit if needed, to get your perfect video ready for audio.

    I use HitFilm Express to edit.  It's a free video editor, does a good job, and was easy to learn the bare minimum to create these videos.  Having already imported the video and trimmed it to just the 'good' part, now IMPORT the .wav file.  Drag it to the track just underneath the video.  You should see the video track, including the audio that recorded on the video track, PLUS the .wav audio file you just dragged under the video.

    Make sure both audio tracks are active.  Play the video, and see how close the two audio tracks are to playing in sync.  Make note of how close, which one starts first, then DRAG the .wav left or right to align with the video's audio track.  It's like lip syncing.  You may have to expand the visible track range, to give finer control over how much you move left or right.

    Do this until the Video audio track and the .wav audio are perfectly matching.  Then UNCHECK the video audio.  It's a little speaker symbol on the left.  Play the video again.  Now only the .wav audio track should be playing, and it should be perfectly synced with the fingers moving as they play the piano.
NOTE: if the .wav needs to move farther left than the video track will allow, select all and drag everything to the right to give yourself a bit of working room.

    Once the video and .wav are synced and the original video audio turned off, trim the ends again if needed. If both tracks aren't fully left-justified to the 0:00 starting point, select All and drag them to the 0:00 time marker.  Export the video as an mp4 file on your hard drive, and upload the video to YouTube.  On Blogger, it's easy to click the video button and select your YouTube video for insertion on the blog post.

I treat the audio this way to clean the original video-recorded audio.  Audio recorded directly in your video (I use my cell phone) is fuzzy, and picks up all the ambient noise.  Dogs barking, phones ringing, people talking... the .wav created from Ableton is crisp, clear, and clean of ambient noise.  It's like you recorded in a studio, with proper microphones.

This is a good stopping point.  I'll finish up in the next post.  We'll take a look at getting Midi onto Blogger in a way that's easily downloadable.

New Old Sennheiser RS 120 Wireless Headphone

     Got a little off track here, but the most amazing thing happened today, and needed to be shared.  I'm ... sort of... hard of hearing.  Hearing aids are beyond the family budget, so it's a matter doing the best you can with what you've got.  I tell my friends and coworkers, there's a 3-repeat limit.  I'll ask you to repeat something twice.  If it's still just garbled static, I pretend I heard and move on.  Yes, it causes problems, but asking for repeats gets old, and 3 times is my limit.

    With that in mind, I've struggled with my Hammer 88 and the audio volume on Ableton.  If it's  loud enough for me to hear, it pegs way over 0 decibels.  Lot of red zone, overpowers the speakers, sounds like static when I play it back as WAV.  You'll see on older posts, I've gone through a few hoops trying to find work-arounds.  The best solution so far was to play very loud while recording, save it as an Ableton set.  Then swap to a quieter instrument for export.  Usually MiniGrand x64 #16, Loud, then #01 Real Piano, for the softer tones.

    Also, last night I started using normalize when exporting audio.  It seems to do just as good a job, without jumping through the hoops.  That might sound simple, but I bought the M-Audio Hammer 88 just to have a digital piano. I play a song, record it live, and output Midi/Wav to share my music online.  The Hammer came with Ableton Live Lite 10.  That's sort of like asking for a match and getting a doomsday bomb.  Way over my head, and overpowered for my purposes.  So stuff like using normalize when exporting?  I don't know enough to even understand what question to ask, until something triggers an inspiration.  Then it's like Christmas!

    But... it came FREE with the keyboard.  I like free, and was willing to learn as needed to achieve the goal.  The Hammer 88 was about half the price of my broken Yamaha DG-640 Digital Grand.  Loved that Yamaha but it wore out, and repairing it was expensive. With no guarantees it would keep working.  So here I am, with the Hammer, learning how to do things as they come up.  At times I'd whine about "just wanting to play my piano..."  Ignore the whining.  I do the same thing about blogging.  There's a lot to learn about the modern blogging landscape.  (Like "consent cookies...")  At my age, learning isn't as easy as it used to be.

    Anyway - back to the hearing problem.  My old headphones were cheap, but nice enough.  But they're so old, the leatherette is falling off every time I pick them up.  And it doesn't just fall to the floor in pieces.  When I try to pick them up, they crumble into dust that leaves a mark like fireplace soot.  I have another old pair, still in the blister pack.  (Yes, it's another $20 headphone.)  Used them yesterday, and it was okay.  Just as good as the old ones, but without the disintegrating leatherette.  Monique saw me messing with them, and tinkering with ways to increase audio.  She's also seen me get the wires tangled, forget I was wearing them and walk away from the computer, and generally being a klutz.  She also remembered another pair of headphones.

    More than a decade ago, for a birthday gift, I gave her a wireless headphone set.  She liked watching tv while using the treadmill, and had expressed a desire for something wireless to listen on.  In those days, we were ridiculously extravagant, and the credit cards were like our own private printing press.  So I found some that had nice reviews.  Not sure if memory serves, but I THINK they were around $180.  They never worked quite right for her, maybe there was too much interference in that room, but they were put away and forgotten.  Monique found them again recently while doing a major cleanup in our storage room.  (Translation: eBay selling, model-building, upright freezer, and junk room.)

    She brought them out last night, tested them on her computer, then offered them to me.  The advantages were tremendous, but I live a cluttered life.  After years of building my "mission control" area, I couldn't figure out a place to put the base.  Seriously, no place left that wasn't stacked to the max.  I said "No thank you" regretfully.  This morning, I revised some priorities, got rid of a couple of things I don't really use any more, and... "appropriated" the headphones back.

    Here's the exciting part- after recharging them, and fine-tuning the channel, I tentatively played a song on the Hammer.  AND HEARD IT AS CLEAR AS A BELL!  Not only that, but there's a volume control on one side.  It was set somewhere in the middle.  When I cranked it up, it was actually much too loud.  Finally, finally, finally, I can hear what I'm playing, the way it should be heard, and not have to jump through hoops to correct the final output.  

    I also tested a YouTube video, and understood what they were saying... without subtitles!!  This decade-old Sennheiser RS 120 Wireless is not even available on Amazon any more.  They have an upgraded model now, and it's something like half the price I paid for these.  Don't care.  This is beyond amazing.  These are just fine, thank you very much.  Don't need an upgrade.  Did I mention I like FREE?  Maybe it wasn't free, but after so many years forgotten in a box, and "re-finding" it at a time I really needed the boost, it felt like a free gift.

    More than a gift, it was encouragement at a time I've been struggling.  I have a new song I want to record, and after two months of practicing, have only had 3 perfect practices.  None of them on video, of course.  It's been discouraging, to put it mildly. Being able to hear myself play is revitalizing.  It's brought joy back to my playing, and restored my hopes of being able to record this song soon.  

NOTE: I deliberately didn't add links to Amazon. I'm not trying to sell anything here.  You want to look for yourself, you'll have to Google it on your own.  I found mine on Amazon, but am sure you can find hundreds of retailers selling much the same thing.  I just wanted to express my happiness in being able to hear the music while playing.  :^)

Grace Notes - Restoring A Lost Website

 So far, these updates have been more 'talk' than 'update'.  I write them for people to read if they want, but mainly to help me not lose the memories.  Eventually I'll start building the "real" pages, with the music.  For now,  just documenting the process so the memory won't be lost.  Between getting older, and losing a great deal of cognition and memory from Covid, forgetting everything important is a huge fear of mine.  So this is something of a journal for me, as well as a record of progress on the blog.

Even back in 2011, when "Grace Notes" was still just wishful thinking, one of it's main purposes was to exercise my memory.  Playing an instrument, learning new songs to play, are supposed to be good for memory.  Making a blog about it felt like a natural extension of the plan.  

After about 10 years, I let the project drop.  It was taking drastically more effort and more time, to learn new songs and arrangements.  Meanwhile, the hosting cost kept shamelessly rising year by year, until I got discouraged and quit.  Eventually funding the hosting company became money I couldn't afford to spend, on a project that never really earned it's keep.  The backup copy made before shutting the site down... disappeared.  The website was gone, all the research and writing was gone.  Recreating the site without the writing, or even my notes, felt like too much of a time sink.

In the middle of all that, my digital grand, the Yamaha DG-640, bit the dust.  Not all at once, but key by key, until it was unusable.  Talked to a repair tech, who told me that the control boards on Yamaha digital grands went brittle after a few years.  Repairs are pointless, because they won't stay repaired.  He convinced me it was cheaper to replace the keyboard.  That's still a lot of money, and it took a while, but now I'm using an M-Audio Hammer 88.  Not really a digital piano, it's more accurately a Midi controller.  It came with Ableton Live 10 Lite.

There were a lot of road blocks along the way, but everything is finally converging.  It took, among other things, getting a dedicated laptop computer to run Ableton.  It also took a lot of time learning a bare minimum to use Ableton.  It was too much complexity for my needs.  Finally everything is working right, and I know exactly how to get my playing from keyboard to Youtube.

Additionally, Monique recently discovered a partial backup of Grace Notes, on the Wayback Machine. It's not complete, but at least I have access to a huge amount of the original site.  I'm nearly done backing all of those pages up onto a hard drive.  Once that's done, there's only one major hurdle left... Adsense.

As best I can tell, my Adsense account is still active.  I'd like to eventually use it on this blog, but google hates plagiarism.  Even when I'm re-creating my own website, with my own original writing.  There doesn't seem to be a sure-fire safe way to put my old pages on this new blog, without being penalized.  The only option is to re-write everything, with enough changes to count as completely original work.

(Update) - After writing around 40 original posts, I applied to Adsense for this site, but was declined.  They wanted me to make drastic and time-consuming changes to the site, for a better chance of being approved.  I like my site the way it is, so there won't be any Adsense on Grace Notes this time around.

At least now, I have much of the original text.  Still time-consuming but better than re-writing it blindly, not knowing if it's different enough.  When I've backed up all the pages that WayBack archived, I'll start bringing back the old(new) pages.

Additionally, I'd like to create and record new arrangements, moving forward with brand new content.  That's the part I'm excited about.  Having fewer "progress reports", and more focus on real content.  Fingers crossed, it won't be long now!!

Learning on the Hammer 88 and Ableton Live Lite 10: Ableton Compatibility Problems

   After a couple of years away from using the Ableton and the Hammer 88, I'm having to learn pretty much from scratch... and never understood that much in the first place.

  All I really want to do is record my piano playing to computer, at the same time as recording a video of my hands playing the song.  I can't just record the song to video and upload to Youtube because our home has 3 dogs, and all the associated noises and distractions most homes have.

  The plan is to record MIDI via Ableton, then export it as music to a WAV file.  WAV, because it's uncompressed and can play without the inconsistencies you get in mp3.  While editing the original video, I'll overlay the WAV, sync it to the original audio, then delete the original audio track.  The finished product gives me a nice "studio" rendition of the music, removing all the 'live' household noises.  (I've done this in the past, with a Yamaha keyboard providing both MIDI, and actual Audio.)

  My problem is that Ableton Live Lite 10 is over my head, and overpowered for me.  It has a steep learning curve.  On the other hand, it came free with the Hammer 88, and can definitely do the job.  There's just so many little bits to figure out.  It took a lot of time way back when, learning all the little details of setting it up, getting actual audio to come out of the computer; making the MIDI input work, learning to record... a whole bunch of time spent just setting things up.  My desktop computer is a good one, but trying to use Ableton, edit video, play games, and "do it all on one computer", it was struggling to keep compatibility with everything.  

    And EVERY SINGLE TIME  Microsoft updated my computer, it force-switched my audio device to either produce NO audio at all, or it changed the output to a second monitor that wasn't even powered on!! 
In most cases, my games had great audio, YouTube and other audio sources had NO audio, and Ableton/Hammer88 did not work AT ALL.  I'd try to change things back, and the settings kept reverting back to the NON-working mode.

  Then it would take weeks getting all the audio on the computer to work together again, and usually Ableton was the hardest part to fix.  I only know a couple of curse-words, but I was using them both on Microsoft non-stop.

  After months of anger management issues, Monique bought me a small laptop, dedicated to ONLY running Ableton.  That solved all the audio driver issues.  I don't remember all the steps it took, nor the audio drivers and add-ons that were tried.  Eventually it all worked again.  I saved the settings as an auto-booting default every time the computer powered up.  One thing that really helped was getting an external audio driver, the M-Audio Air/Hub.  It was a reasonable price, and fixed most of the problems.

  Finding a nice "Piano" setting that I like has been difficult.  Some are great, some not, but they all struggle to reach the volume I need to hear.  I'm losing my hearing, so the volume needs to be loud.  But when it's loud enough for me to hear, the audio "redzones".  Tonight I discovered a solution.  Might not be the correct solution, but it works, and I'm satisfied.

  First, choose a piano that's naturally loud - the MiniGrand x64, with setting 16: Always Loud works for me.  It's kind of tinny, but with all the volume settings maxed, I can hear it just fine.  And yes, Ableton Master Output volume does peak over 0 decibels.  Quite often, but it doesn't bother me.  Because tonight I realized I'm not recording actual finished audio output.  I'm recording midi instructions for Ableton to store.  A simple, basic realization, but to me it was an exhilarating breakthrough.

  When the midi is finished and saved, change the piano to one that plays 'more normally'.  Something softer, with lower volume, and the output volume can be reduced until none of the loudest parts redline.
  For this, I currently like MiniGrand x64, but using setting 01: Real Piano.

  Now the audio can be exported as music (a .WAV file in my case), and won't have clipping.  I might be mistaken, but it seems like this particular piano package came with the Hammer/Ableton.  The pictures below show both the main screen and the MiniGrand x64 toolbox screen, with the MiniGrand x64 being found under "Plug-Ins".  There are some other pianos under Plug-Ins, and some more under "Instruments".  Some probably came with Ableton, others were free ones found by Googling.  Even more got deleted, because many of the free ones I found online weren't very good.

One final tip, for screen-grabbing on my HP laptop...  Hold Windows key+Shift+S to copy an image into memory.  Open a graphic program like IfranView, and paste the image onto the page (or hit Ctrl+V).  The resulting image can be saved to your hard drive.  From there, I copy the files onto a USB drive then transfer them to my main computer.  Since the laptop is ONLY for Ableton, this is a simple low-resource way to get screenshots from one computer to the other.
(I could have used Drop Box, Google Drive, email, or other online tricks, but the laptop struggles to keep up with Ableton already.  Trying to run more software just bogs it down.)
    NOTE:  I've since learned how to use Google Drive, in it's simplest browser version.  It's made transferring files a lot easier.)

This is a pretty boring post, but it's exciting news to me.  It has the added advantage of acting as a guide for myself in the future.  Just in case I forget.  :^)

These Wonderful Broken Years part II (the short-short music clip)

 Yesterday I woke up with an unusually detailed and vivid dream stuck in my head.  Aside from the general dream, there was a Victrola with wood-grained sides, off-white surface, and vividly shiny brass horn/amplifier.  There was one line of music that was crystal clear; I heard orchestral music with wind and stringed instruments, 3 female voices singing the words in gorgeous harmony, the words "These wonderful broken years, wonderful broken years, these wonderful broken years."  It was the ending line of a song I'd never heard before, and when I got up, could not find the song existing online.  

Having such a short track made me curious in the dream, so I picked up the album and examined it.  Most of the tracks were of normal width, but that last track had a very small grooved section.  The record label wasn't entirely clear, but had the song title, "These Wonderful Broken Years".  The title was in an elegant cursive script, and I could clearly read it in the dream.  When I woke, I still had the vision of the album and the melody of that final line in my memory.

After writing the (much longer) blog about the dream, I spent most of yesterday trying to get that track into mp3 form on my computer.  It took hours, because I've had a Hammer 88 for a couple of years, along with Ableton Live 10 Lite, but only learned enough back then to play live piano.  Then I set the whole thing aside for over a year, and only recently felt inspired to get it all running again.  Even the little I used to know was long gone, and the day was a long learning session.

The most frustrating part was exporting the saved melody from Ableton.  Since the input method was MIDI, I thought the export method had to be MIDI.  It took an embarrassingly long time to realize the output was not MIDI, but the other option.  I don't have that computer running at the moment, but I think it was titled "Audio", or "Song"... something like that, but NOT MIDI.

After all that, here's the musical phrase in mp3 format, repeated 3 times, for a total file length of 28 seconds.  Really short. The record album in the video is pretty close to how I saw it in my dream, including the cursive font... but it seemed larger and easier to read in the dream.
     It also has Southern Gospel/Country & Western leanings.  That's my fault - I play by ear, and this is how I play.  In the dream, it was a much purer orchestral music, like Lawrence Welk would have played... These Wonderful Broken Years