Piano World Home Page Forums Fun Stuff! - Parties, Tours, Projects & More... Member Recordings La Valse d'Amelie

Hi! I'm an adult re-starter and this is one of the pieces I learned recently. It's a waltz by Yann Tiersen, from that quirky French movie "Amelie".

http://www.savefile.com/files.php?fid=3375930

This is my first recording, so I'd really love to know what you think. Big thanks to my hubby for handling the nitty-gritty of the recording process. All I did was play, and he took care of the cables and the software and tweaking and posting and such.

Comments are very much appreciated! Your feedback really means a lot to me.

Very nice! Sadly, I cannot get specific (if you enjoy that sort of thing) because I know little about the piece (first time I heard it). But your performance was convincing enough for me.

dvdiva:

Great job. Kudos to your husband for recording it well. Is he an audio engineer? Your performance brought back that movie instantly. Made me want to watch it again.

Beautiful dvdiva

I was getting a buzz all the way through it though? is it at my end or the recording?

I heard an album by "Ludovico Einaudi" (think that's how its spelt?)....reminded me a little of him. Its meant as a compliment BTW (just incase you don't like him)

I shall listen again

thanks


Lee

I think it's you. Just let me know if your dog starts giving you orders to play certain chords. It's an 'early warning sign'. :p

Derelux and pianomad: Thank you so much for the comments! It's quite a confidence boost getting a thumbs up from you accomplished concert pianists! Thank you for listening.

Hardly. :p We had crappy audio cables and he spent hours figuring out if the sound was better coming from the mono line-out or from the headphone jack. Either way, there was a LOT of noise and crackles and pops, probably because of the old flimsy mono cable and the jack converter. After a lot of trial and error, in the end, he resorted to software (Soundforge) to improve the sound quality.

Thank you for the compliment Lee! I'm glad it reminded you of music you like (although I haven't heard of Einaudi. I need a lot more music exposure!).

And you're right, there IS a buzz. The raw recording had a LOT of noise and a very low, loud buzz, but we ran it through a noise or distortion filter in Soundforge to clean it up. The sound improved, but it's still audible if you're using headphones on your PC rather than desktop speakers (which is why maybe others can't hear it).

I'm not sure if this will help, and I think you'd need to perform this operation on the original sound file. In Soundforge, there is an operation called "DC offset..." found under the Process menu. From their help file:

The DC Offset dialog allows you change the baseline of a sound file to compensate for electrical mismatches between your sound card and input device. Glitches and other unexpected results can occur when sound effects are applied to files that contain DC offsets.

I used this once when transferring digital audio from DAT to my PC to remove a low grade noise. Again, I'm not sure if this applies in your case.

Can't wait to hear more recordings from you.

Thank you pianomad! Will try that next time. Except that, due to an extremely limited repertoire, I don't really have anything else to record, hee (maybe in a year's time!). Thanks for the tips!

That's really nice! It was really clean and you played it beautifully!

That recording quality sounds really nice also. Keep up the good work!

Hi dvdiva

Ah!...I'm glad you pointed that out, I was listening through headphones (thought I was hearing things for a moment )

regards


Lee