Piano bars

[ted]

Does anybody here have any experience with these devices ? A strip containing motion sensors fits across the rear of the keyboard and records keypresses into an electronic device, which can be used to feed music software to create a file or a score.

I thought it might be handy to recapture improvisation. It wouldn't give you the rhythms but at least you wouldn't have to wear out the tape trying to hear all the notes. The shop here wanted nearly NZ$3000 for one, which I think is somewhat steep.

I might be tempted later on if the ridiculous price comes down but I would like to speak to somebody who has one and uses it.

[Ed Thomas]

Dang.  I thought this was a post on the best places to relax with a beer while listening to potted palm frond music.

Don't know anything about the other thing.

[Brian Healey]

I've never heard of any kind of "motion sensors", but you can record your keystrokes into a music notation program in order to create a score just by using MIDI. I'm not a huge computer/tech guy, but I think you can do what you described with MIDI, and MIDI's not too expensive.

[Ed Thomas]

Ted, Having dabbled a little bit in electronics and electro-mechanical things in my sordid past, I think that such a device probably would get expensive.  It isn't trivial, and the demand for it wouldn't be enough to drive the cost per unit down.  Can you find any digital keyboard that is tolerable enough for you to use?  I bet they would be more reliable, and FAR more flexible.  They would capture most of what you would need for analysis of your playing.  Plus you can keep it set up just for that purpose and use your real piano normally.

Brian,  MIDI (stands for Music Instrument Digital Interface) is just a description of the protocol for sending information from one device to another so it means something at each end.  In order to use it, there has to be a "sender", which is what Ted was asking about... the piano bar would turn his piano into a sending device.  What he wants to know is if anyone has ever used one, which you and I apparently have not.

Ted, my gut feeling is that you'd be fooling with the darned thing all the time trying to keep it working right, unless it was exceptionally well-made... and that means those big bucks they were asking for it.

[jr11]

Ted;  the device you are looking for is marketed by Pianodisc. I won't give you the URL directly here, but it is easy to find.

They are best factory installed on a new piano, as it is being assembled. Aftermarket installation is a tricky and somewhat risky procedure. Technicians I have spoken to would just as soon not do it.

I do not believe the price you quoted was out of line, even if it doesn't include installation.

[nipon gaki]

sorry to correct you, but "piano bar" is a product from moog.
(remember the old mood synths?) anyway the piano bar sits on top of your keboard on the piano. motion sencors do take the information from the notes you are playing on the piano and put it through a sound module. Now you can have piano plus a synth string sound or what ever playing w/ you.....result; kinda cheesey. this is not a mount your self player piano but you do know have access to record w/ midi

so there

[Ed Thomas]

Ted:  Here is a site that sells them and has information, pictures, and videos on them.

https://www.musiciansbuy.com/moog_piano_bar_with_free_items_pb001kit.html

Now that I see what you are talking about, I can understand why you are interested.  The Piano Bar doesn't have any impact on the piano or keyboard itself that I can see, and claims to capture velocity information so your dynamics would be approximated. 

It is common for me to open my mouth and express an opinion before gathering any facts.  I find that they accumulate all around me much faster that way.    Is the price of $1399 US equivalent to your NZ quotes?

[ted]

Thanks to everybody who posted here, particularly you, Ed, for taking so much trouble.

I have more or less decided to leave it for a while. For not much more expense I can have my piano (Weinbach 5'10" - nice piano, and therefore worth the work) completely overhauled, which it needs after thirty-one years of very heavy playing. The NZ$ at the moment is about 0.7US$, so the price on that website tells me that the dealer here is between NZ$800 and NZ$1000 sharp, even allowing for freight.

As my purpose in getting it would appear to be unique to me, I have come to the conclusion that I would just have to try it out. The difficulty of doing this, coupled with the dealer's woeful lack of detailed knowledge of his product, lend a trifle too much risk to the exercise. Your suggestion of buying a keyboard to record improvisation, of course, had occurred to me, and I actually tried this with a friend's instrument. Yes, it gives you the pitches, but the resulting spiderweb of rhythmless notation still has to be painstakingly deciphered.This would occur with a piano bar too, but the flow of ideas on my piano is a hundred times better than on a keyboard, which doesn't do much for me as far as the act of playing is concerned.


The method I have devised for myself is to record improvisation then, while the ideas are fresh in my mind, simply speak onto the tape, using as much verbal detail as necessary, describing what I am playing sufficiently well to enable a return to it in a month or a year. At least this is easier than transcribing by ear, an exercise which, owing to the complexity of my improvisation, and my own humble degree of aural acuity, is altogether too inadequate.

So you have enabled me to reach a decision for now. Thank you.

Ted.

 

[Brian Healey]

Your suggestion of buying a keyboard to record improvisation, of course, had occurred to me, and I actually tried this with a friend's instrument. Yes, it gives you the pitches, but the resulting spiderweb of rhythmless notation still has to be painstakingly deciphered.

That is true. I have done stuff like this before with MIDI. Not with improvisation, but with notating my own compositions. I find it much easier to play something into the computer, which will record the notes, then it is to sit there and manually enter each one.

Since the computer records rhythm so accurately, what you end up with on the notation program is usually much different than what you want. If you miss the rhythm of a note by even the smallest, un-measurable amount of time, it turns what you played into a "spiderweb" (as you put it) of rhythmic ridiculousness.

However, if you quantize the results, it will usually fix everything right up. Quantizing means that the computer is fitting all the notes into specfic rhythmic envelope. For instance, if you played a string of eigth notes, the finished product may not look like eigth notes at all. But if you quantize it at the eigth note setting, it will shift all the notes over to the nearest eigth note slot. After quantizing, editing is usually a snap (just fixing minor things, like wrong notes and stuff). I hope that makes sense.

It seems like there is no easy solution to your problem. If you're using free rhythm (or a lot of rubato) while you improvise, then both MIDI and that piano bar thing are going to be more trouble than they're worth, because neither can detect when you're changing the tempo and react accordingly. It will just assume you're playing along at a steady pace.

[ted]

Thanks for your comments, Brian. Yes, I found that happened when I tried the exercise with my friend's digital piano. I think many composers, consciously or unconsciously, create with notation in mind even during improvisation. That is to say, the rhythms their creative impulse generates will tend to be rhythms defined mentally by notation anyway, and therefore will tend to be easier to write out, even approximately, than those produced by felt rhythms alone.

Aside from this consideration there is the deeper issue of how much of this stuff it is desirable or necessary to write out at all. I suppose in attempting a written approximation we are primarily concerned with communicating to other players the ability to reproduce our improvisation as closely as possible. Many recent editions of the jazz masters transcribed by ear by Dapogny, Scivales, Posnak and others are fulfilling a very worthwhile function in this sense, but the labour expended in preparing such scores must have been enormous, and Morton, Waller and the stride group created in notation based rhythms to start with.

With the improvement in readily available tape and CD recorders, it can hardly be said any longer that a recorded improvisation is any more transient than a played composition, at least in the sense of durability of media. Therefore the philosophical question boils down to exactly why one would take the time and trouble to make a written approximation. In my own case it stems from seemingly ceaseless accusations of selfishness from people. Indeed, I have taken pains to write out a lot over the years but with time marching on I want to enjoy myself too, and increasingly I create spontaneously and worry less about altruism. If anything I do sets the world on fire, which event is extremely unlikely, then I think somebody else can transcribe my recordings after I am dead !

Thanks for your input.

Ted.