This piano piece is credited to Scott Joplin and Scott Hayden. It was originally published in 1913.
I chose this one almost randomly from Joplin's works. I wanted to make a rag time video, but not Maple Leaf or the Entertainer (although I will get to those eventually). I went through some sheet music until I found a piece with a nice groove to it.
According to wikipedia, kismet means 'fate' among other things. The picture from the sheet music shows the sphinx. I have no idea what this piece has to do with Egypt or fate, and if I had to guess I would say it was just a way to sell more copies of the score when it was published.
I used the ragtime piano samples from Kontakt. While nice sounding, I ran into a bit of a problem. At velocity level 99-100 there is a huge jump in both timbre and volume. This made editing velocity levels problematic. I wanted the sound of the louder attack on some parts, but the volume change was more than I wanted. I had to go in and edit the volume automation after the velocity levels to smooth things out.
Phrasing this piece was more enjoyable than one might expect. I had fun with subtle changes between phrases and on the repeats. I edited the midi notes on each repeat rather than just copying and pasting them. The subtle differences between similar sections give the piece a more pleasing performance. This did add time to the production time of the video, but I feel that it was worth the effort.
Once again I ran into the limitations of the MAM player. It is a wonderful piece of software considering it is free, but obtaining a good looking video is nearly impossible. I might be able to do it if I took 10 takes and spliced the good parts into a single video. However my editing skills are too limited at this point for that kind of work. The problem is jitter. The program just does not run smoothly most of the time. It seems to run smoothly at random intervals. I will be looking into a different program or two for my next video in hopes of getting better quality results.
As a side note, I stumbled upon a genre of music that I was unaware of: novelty piano. It seems that it was an off shoot of ragtime, and was performed on the player piano much of the time. This sounds like the perfect music for some videos!
video link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GD6odp2biQ
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