[sephirothpuppet]

Hi all,

I have a newbie question. I posted a few arrangements a couple years back, and have wanted to get back involved with the game arrangement community; preferably, though, in a performance capacity, since I'm focusing my studies in that direction for the foreseeable future. When do people most often recruit pianists to record their arrangements? Does a lot of recording take place outside of the album projects? Is there any formal or de facto standard procedure for getting yourself picked? :-P I'm just curious, feeling things out at the moment. Any info is appreciated.

Thanks much!

[Nicol Armarfi]

Arrangements are not usually recorded live, and as far as I know, pianists are never recruited to record arrangements. They're usually sampled by software.

I believe this is a problem.

Spending as much time as I do at a real instrument, it becomes annoying hearing synthesized pianos weakly performing otherwise warm and robust arrangements. I can't speak for anyone else here, but I'd assume they think the same way as me: it's a great pleasure to hear anyone playing or saying they play our arrangements, so really, you can record whatever you'd like, there's not really a giant crowd waiting to record someone's arrangements. If you talked to any one here about recording their arrangements, I'm sure they'd be thrilled.

But this brings to mind an idea; that we could get together some of the more experienced musicians on SquareSound to record a selection of original arrangements from the site. I personally couldn't record anything this moment, as my piano is total shit (if anyone has seen my youtube videos, you would have realized this), but within a few months I'll be getting a new baby grand (woo). In the mean time, if anyone else is interested, I'd be glad to set up a thread and sort of moderate the project, but I won't be able to actually step in and record until later.

[The-Real-Link]

I have kind of been thinking along the lines of Nicol. I had thought of maybe trying to set a sort of Squaresound Piano Album of sorts. Maybe have people nominate and vote for the arrangements to be performed and then have some of the more experienced pianists record performances of them. The problem would probably be that people would be either too busy, or their instrument would not be in adequate condition. My piano is in good condition, but it's a spinet which is not ideal for performance....or practice for that matter. My teacher would gladly let me use her grand I'm sure. It would be nice if all the pianists could meet somehwere and have it recorded at an actual studio....but that's totally out of the question I'm sure.

I would be happy to record video of myself playing peoples arrangements, but I probably won't be able to until later this year. I just started all my new piano pieces, so practicing them is taking up most of my time, as they are very hard pieces. I'm playing 14 pieces this year including two Chopin pieces (A waltz and an etude), a Beethoven Sonata, a Mozart Fantasy, a MacDowell music poem, among many others. I'm playing a few moderns pieces this year including a piece out of both the FFIX Piano Collections and the KH Piano Collections, as well as a piece from E.T. (Good ol' John Williams!) .

[sephirothpuppet]

Thanks for the timely response guys!

I absolutely agree with you that it's a mistake not to be getting live players involved. I would be thrilled to see some of your ideas fleshed out. I won't have access to decent recording equipment/environments until the new semester gets underway, but in the meantime, if there really is such a lack of live arrangement recordings, I will try to sift through some of the work on this site and pick out a couple of tunes to start working on. I could always post some rough videos, just to (hopefully) give people an idea of what they're missing out on by relying too much on samples!

Thanks again for the quick replies.

[MilesOfMusic]

My school has a recording studio, so I'd be keen if people were wanting some piano recordings of their arrangments.