Play by Ear Using Audible With Complex Multiple-Instrument Music

     Not sure if that's the clearest title ever.  In case it's not clear enough, this article explains the process by which I learn a song by ear, when the song has a full band playing several (or many) instruments.  Especially if they're being jazzy and the melody switches between instruments, while they're all playing at the same time.  Even more so if I'm trying to play it in the original fashion, instead of in my own style.  I'm assuming that you already play by ear, and can pick out a melody by listening to the original music.  My rule of thumb used to be, if I can whistle it, I can play it.  These days, there's a caveat... I also have to be able to remember the whole tune without forgetting what it sounded like.  This is the process I follow when simply hearing a song isn't enough to be able to play it back.  It's mainly useful if you're struggling with memory issues and can't remember the entire song in one piece right off the bat.  Occasionally, it's exceptionally helpful to break down a too-complicated part of the music so I can hear exactly what notes they're hitting.

    Case in point, I'm trying to learn the University of Georgia Bulldogs "Glory Glory Dixieland" at the moment.  I've played my own version of Battle Hymn of the Republic for years, in a Southern Gospel style.  There's some commonality with Dixieland, but a lot of differences too. 

    Most of the time, I learn by listening, matching the keys, doing a ton of repetition to help remember the melody.  Easy enough, the only hard part is matching the key if it's not one I'm good at, and remembering the full melody if it's not a tune I already know well.  But this version of the Battle Hymn is in a key I'm not great with... and the melody drifts in and out with the different instruments like a fox laying a trail for the hounds. I'm not familiar with the patterns the band is using.

    There might be better options, but I'm a big fan of "Free", and Audible is free, open source, and a fantastic audio editor.  As usual, I only learn what I need as it's needed. Audible is way beyond me in all the many things that it can do, it helps to focus just on the useful parts.  I use it to adjust audio clips, digitize audio from very old VHS tapes, and to make sure all my audio is output in WAV.  WAV is uncompressed and lossless, and excellent for aligning a sound track with a video.  Learning to play a song with Audible is a new process for me, but as I get older and my memory declines, it's become a great help for learning songs in smaller chunks of sound.  And in the case of "Glory Glory Dixieland", slowing the audio down enough to hear the distinct notes being played is a Godsend.

    When a song doesn't have a clear melody being played by a single instrument, listening to a small segment over and over will also help you pick out which line you prefer to follow.  In "Glory Glory Dixieland", at times there's a jumble of sound.  I'll listen to it until one part stands out over another part, and pick that as the melody to follow.

    To start, open Audible and load the music file.  If you simply play the file, it will play the complete song and stop.  If you click and drag sections in the audio track, you'll highlight a portion of the audio.  Now when you play, it will play the highlighted section and stop.   At the end of the playback controls, clicking on the "Loop" command will add  a looping region that matches your highlighted section. (It shows as two bars in the timeline above the audio track.) Now it can play that one loop over and over, and you can focus on that one brief clip until you've figured out the notes you need.  

   Right click on the loop track, select clear, and you can choose another section to highlight.  Or select either side of the selected range and drag to reposition them. Listening to the music, piece by piece, you can learn the entire song in this fashion.  

    If the music is fast, or too complex at normal speed, you can slow it down.  For a quick fix, there's an information line below the tracks, and in that line you'll see a green arrow.  Hovering over it shows "Play-At-Speed."  To its right, you can change the speed it plays back by sliding the button.  This will change playback speed on the fly.  It's great if you just need a quick comparison, but as you change the speed, the pitch will also change, meaning it won't play back in the same key.

 

  Highlight the entire audio track, and from the "Effect" dropdown menu, choose "Change Tempo."  This will let you adjust the speed to your liking.  (I like to reduce the speed by about 30% for breaking down fast segments.)  If you click "Preview," you can hear a short sample with the new setting.  If the new speed sounds right, click "Apply." Now you have the entire song slower, but still playing in the original key!

    Save your work when it's done processing.  I export a WAV file, then save a "Project" file.  If you want to change the speed again at a later point, reload your original audio and make the change.  Reason being, changing the tempo while keeping the pitch results in artifacts in the file.  I haven't noticed them at one iteration, but the Audible website says it gets worse with each iteration, like making a xerox copy, then a copy of the copy, then a copy of the copy... it winds up losing quality.

    Now it's just a matter of learning the song at an easier pace.  Choose a small segment, listen over and over until you can match it.  If there's too many instruments, keep replaying the section, but listen for a melody that stands out over the rest of the instruments.  When you're trying to convert a whole band into a single person playing on the piano, you have to choose which parts work best and which parts aren't necessary.  I'll learn several segments, then practice playing them all in one run, then adjust the highlighted playback to the longer segment, and learn to play all those parts in time with the audio clip.  I'll learn the song as I go, and wind up being able to play along with the original music at it's original pace.  (Unless it's original speed is too fast for me to keep up!)

As always, I'm primarily writing this to accommodate my own memory loss.  If the time comes I can't remember how, this guide will remind me.  If it helps anybody else, that makes it even better.  :^)

    

    

Meeting In The Air Southern Gospel on Piano

  

Click to download:
Meeting In The Air Sheet Music

Meeting In The Air MIDI File

     This marks the 2nd new Southern Gospel song posted since re-starting this blog.  Meeting In The Air is an old old favorite.  I loved to sing this in church when I was a kid.  It's one of the songs I can clearly remember from church, from Uncle Freil playing, and from playing it myself.

    The song's original copyright was in 1925, and is currently under the Public Domain.  It was written by Mae Taylor Roberts.  According to Hymnary, the copyright notice originally contained this offer:  "This song may be had in sheet music at 25 cents a copy. Order from Mrs. Mae T. Roberts, 1554, East Washington, Pasadena, California."  Since that was nearly a century ago, I sincerely doubt she's still honoring her offer.
    I've looked for more information or songs from Mae Taylor Roberts, but couldn't find anything beyond the small amount Hymnary has.  If you'd like the lyrics, Hymnary offers 3 verses plus chorus.  I've seen it in the past with 4 verses, but usually consider Hymnary to be the most reliable source of hymn information.

    Speaking of verses, I took the road less traveled this time.  Most of the time, I'll do two or three verses with a chorus between each. This time around, I had an example to follow.  I recently found several decades-old videos of my uncle Freil playing.  This was one of the songs, so I had the rare opportunity to compare my version to his.  For his version of the song, he simply played the verses three times.  Didn't play the chorus at all.  It never occurred to me that could be an option; plus, I liked that a lot, so I'm following his lead and just playing three verses.  

    Also, not surprising at all... his way of playing Meeting in the Air is much better than mine.  I tend to play a very direct melody line.  Freil had a subtler approach.  He wound in and around the melody line, in ways that would never have occurred to me, lending his variations a much more sophisticated feel.

    With some effort (okay, a lot of effort), I listened to his version of Meeting in the Air over and over, working on learning how he did it.  Unless you're very familiar with Friel's style, you probably won't hear the difference.  But for those of us who knew him, it's there.  The first and last verses are my style.  The middle verse is as close to how he played the song as I can get.  The difference blurs a bit, because over time, fiddling with the arrangement, some of  his style blended with mine.  That's fabulous, because I'd love to be able to play more like Freil.

    Regardless, I'm happy with the arrangement.  I can tell what's mine and what's Freil's, and love the fact that even after all these years, I'm still learning from him.  

    The video itself is a whole other story.  I have a new (outdated, but new to me) cell phone, and struggled with the settings.  It has problems with the audio.  It sounds like it's playing underwater, with strangely distorted sounds, and halfway through the video the audio stops entirely.  My final attempt was with the lower resolution setting turned on.  It was the best version I'd played, out of several hours of trying to fix the video.  By that point my hands ached, and I was getting tired to the point of starting to play worse, rather than better.  So I took that final effort as 'best effort' and called it done.  The playing is fair enough, but the lower resolution makes the video itself disappointing.
    I'd like to fix the audio issue, or at least figure out what's going on.  But... the video plays with perfect timing, and I never use the original audio anyway.  I always use Ableton to record while playing, export it as a Wav file, and overlay the Wav on top of the original video's audio track.  It's cleaner than the original audio, with none of the ambient noise, barking dogs, etc.  So, the odd audio isn't an issue in this particular situation.  At least, not for making these piano videos.

        I've been working on this for a couple of months (or longer).  It would have been easy enough to do a simple arrangement in the key of C.  That's always been my wheelhouse.  But for these videos, I try to change up the keys a little, and offer greater variation in each verse.  With age and covid affecting my memory, it takes longer to get comfortable with an arrangement I like, and my ability to play it perfectly is based more on good luck, no matter how much I practice.  So, please pardon any errors.  The style is there, clearly enough that other pianists can take inspiration from the style and arrangement.  Aside from the actual video of me playing the piano... there's also a "how-to" video using Midiano (see sidebar link to Midiano) to play the song at normal speed, and half speed.  

    In addition to the how-to, the Midi file for Meeting In The Air is available on this page for download.  You can download the file, go to Midiano and play it, which comes with a variety of options that will help in learning to play the song.  You don't have to use Midiano, any Midi player is fine, but I don't know of any free player that can do everything that Midiano does.  Actually, I don't know of any better midi player at all, paid or free. 

     If you read sheet music, a pdf file is also available for download.  All the downloads are available for free, on this page.  (At some point I'll consider adding appropriate affiliate ads, maybe a "buy me a coffee" link, but as of this moment, haven't looked into them yet.)    But even then, there's no obligation, no charge to download.   Get the files, enjoy them, but if you share them, please credit me for the arrangement.  :^)

    

The Technical Side of Grace Notes: Midi and the Missing Sheet Music

     Still celebrating the first brand new posting of my own piano arrangement (Stepping On The Clouds).  Part One of this "Technical Side of Grace Notes" article dealt with how I learn a new song and the process of creating the finished video and blog post.  Today we'll finish with getting the Midi file on Blogger, and acknowledging the missing sheet music.  Then, I'll have a solid reminder against the future and my failing memory.  :^)

    In the previous post, I explained how to save all three elements from Ableton.  The full SET, so I can always re-create the Midi and .wav files.  Just in case.  Plus, of course, the actual Midi and .wav files.  We already applied the .wav file to the video, for a clean audio track with no ambient noise.

    The Midi file I do for it's own sake, for those readers who want it.  Either just to play with Midi on their own setup, or to use Midi as a controllable process for learning how to play my arrangements.  If you downloaded the Midi in order to learn the song, I strongly recommend using Midiano.com as a teaching tool.  It plays my music more "true" than just about anything out there.  It has a visual keyboard you can watch to see the notes as they fall, and the ability to slow down the playback for easier learning.  Plus many other options.

    Not that I have any illusions about my skill level.  There are a ton of musicians on YouTube that put me to shame.  But as my Mom said, there are also plenty of people who are at the perfect level to learn and appreciate what I can offer.  So I don't let all those better players prevent me from putting my two cents in!  

    I'd call my complexity level simple to middling.  There are at least three sites out there that link to my playing as the ideal way to play a specific song.  One of them is even using my sheet music AND my video (it was for Amazing Grace). 
    They were kind enough to give full credit, and to rate the complexity at "Intermediate".  That's higher than I'd expect, and it's very kind of them to share my music.  It validates Mom's advice.

    The real struggle with the Midi wasn't in creating the file, but in getting it onto Blogger in a way that's easy for readers to download.  On the original Grace Notes, I was paying a... large percentage of income... to have a dedicated site to use Wordpress, which I loved.  It had a lot more versatility than Blogger.  But hosting the site got drastically more expensive every single year.  Now I use Google Blogger.  Blogger itself is free.  And a basic Google Workspace is only $12.00 per month.  I still have my custom url, Crewman6.com, and that's a low once-a-year fee.  

    To get to the point, Wordpress offers many options, and you can easily attach just about ANY kind of file for download. Blogger, oddly, only offers Video, Images, or links to other web pages.  Having other filetypes, like Midi, requires a workaround. So here's the gist of it:

    Put the Midi file in your Google Drive, give access to anybody with the link, and copy the link.  Then go to Google Drive Direct Link Generator.  Follow the instructions there to paste your link, then create a direct download link to your Google Drive file.  This is extremely important.  If you try to link to the URL generated by Google Drive, it will open an entirely new webpage, loading it in OVER your blog post.  Then it will attempt to play the midi file in your browser.  Then it will tell you the browser can't play that file, and offer to let you download the file.  THEN you can finally select to download the file.

    That's a huge pain, and the reader winds up on a completely different page, no longer on your post.  Using Google Drive Direct Link Generator is awesome, and free.  It lets you put the modified link on any text or image in your Blogger post, and anybody who clicks the link will be able to simply download the file.  I like choosing where to save downloaded files, so use the "Save As" option.  You might have your downloads default to a single directory for all downloads.  Either is fine.  The point is, the viewer easily downloads the file, without disrupting their reading.  

    Next up, those missing sheet music pages.  On the old Grace Notes blog, I used MidiSheetMusic to both play, and generate sheet music.  It did a great job, but is outdated now and doesn't work with any Midi generated by Ableton.  (Resaving from another Midi player doesn't help either.)  Now I'm in the process of finding another program that can convert Midi to Sheet music, and allow me to make image files of the sheet music.  Originally, those images were saved into .pdf files and uploaded to the blog for anybody that wanted to download.  That's still the plan, but it's been difficult to find software that does exactly what I need.

    I thought I'd solved the problem with MuseScore, which is free to download, converts Midi to sheet music, and allows printing.  Unfortunately, my play-by-ear style seems to confuse Musescore, and when it plays the music back, it completely messes up the order of notes.  Especially if they're played very close together to accentuate the melody.  You know... kind of like a "Grace Note"...  

    Not sure why it struggles with that, because it's sleek and sophisticated software that I like a lot.  Unfortunately, it's not the only one that struggles with my midi.  So far the rule is, if it understands my playing properly, it either offers no sheet music generation, or the function is only available with purchase of the full software.  All the free players that generate printable sheet music have been unable to play the files correctly.

    My favorite, Midiano, plays my stuff perfectly, but as of yet, has no option to create sheet music.  That's not really what Midiano's about, anyway.  My second favorite is a paid software called Notation Musician.  They have a free version, so I KNOW it can play my music perfectly, exactly as intended.  They also generate sheet music.  But the free version does not allow print output.  Yes, I could do screengrabs page by page, but I want to do this the right way.  I'll save up until I can buy the software properly.

    That said, it's $90.00 to purchase, and our budget is very finely balanced to buy food, fuel, pay insurance and taxes.  There's not a lot of leeway for fun things that don't 'earn their keep' monetarily.  So it may take a while to buy Notation Musician.  When I do, I'll go back to any posts as needed and add sheet music downloads.  For now, you're welcome to convert my Midi into sheet music in any way that works for you.  Again, I recommend Midiano.  It's an amazing learning tool, and one of the few players that interprets my playing exactly as intended.

And that's where I'm at, in terms of continuing on Grace Notes.  The last two 'technical' posts were intended to act as memory storage, in case I forget how to do these steps, but I published them just in case any of it might be useful to someone else.  If anybody other than my wife or my mom read these last two posts in their entirety, I'll be totally amazed.  :^D

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.

Goodbye World Goodbye: Getting VHS Video Transferred to the Computer

    Last night's post was all about the end result.  Getting to play a duet with my uncle, and sharing it with the world.  Today's going to be the "prequel."  The story of how it got from a 2-decade-old videotape, to the state it's in now, and how I hope to get the real video uploaded eventually.

    To begin with... that photo was taken in 1962.  Freil was the youngest of my aunts and uncles, the baby of the family.  I was two at the time.  Mom's always said Nanny (her Mom) didn't get to see me until I was two, because of Dad's Navy career.  Nanny said I was walking already the first time she saw me.  So, just guessing, this photo might have been during that first visit.

    Fast forward to 1996, there was a family reunion.  We have a huge family, reunions were a big thing.  Freil was there, and of course everybody begged him to play.  I got a pretty long video of him playing.  At one point, he tried to 'escape', and asked me to play.  I've never been as good, but what I know, I learned by watching and listening to him.  Instead of letting us switch, someone asked us to play a song together, and Goodbye World Goodbye was the result.  It was one of those perfect moments, where everything goes absolutely right.  

    The rest of the video was mainly reunion events.  Later, I edited the raw footage, using his music as background track for the scenes.  By the early 2000's I'd sold or worn out most of my equipment, including the Hi-8 Camera.  The original tape is (I hope) somewhere in a box in our shed.  About 2016, Mom brought out one of the edited vhs reunion tapes.  It would have been a third-generation copy- raw Hi-8 to SVHS Master Edit, to regular VHS done using a 6-deck setup for small production duplication.  Better than home quality, way below broadcast quality.  And regardless, it's not optimal to have a final product at 3 generations. Back in the days of analog video, each generation lost significant quality.  

EZCap Video Grabber... not as good as it used to be 

  I bought a cheap transfer device from Amazon - EZCap Video Grabber.  It wasn't great, but it got the job done.  I borrowed Mom's VHS tape, and used an old VCR we still had.  It didn't come with software, but provided a link to free software.  It was already old when I ordered it, but with some tinkering and some online guides, I got it to work on Windows 10, on a computer I no longer have.     
    Now, that one video is on a file on my computer.  It's a poor scan, made from a 3rd-generation copied vhs tape. The video quality is not good enough to rescue, and the footage of Freil was mostly edited out anyway.  All I could save was audio of some of his playing, and that was muddied by background crowd noises.  That was the intent way back then... to use his piano playing as background audio for the reunion.  The conversations, the meal, the prayers, the announcements... I never thought it would be used to rescue Freil's music from.

    I'd forgotten the file existed.  Even that computer is gone, but I always save the internal hard drives from my old computers and add them to the new one.  Recently I was trying to make the EZCap work again.  Some programs acknowledged it's existence (VLC), but none of the ones I tried were compatible with it, including the original software.  It was while trying to run the old software, I found that old family reunion video.  Pure luck and coincidence, but I'll take it.  Sometimes you have to work with what you've got.

Serendipity plus hard work

    Even though the quality was bad, the audio was recognizable.  Hoping for an easy solution, I tried loading the file on Audacity, but Audacity can't load video files.  I tried using HitFilm Express (a free video editor) to separate the audio, but couldn't find an option to save the audio without the video.  There's a lot of results when you google the question, but I wound up using VLC, a free video player with a lot of options.  THIS SITE has a slightly outdated guide, but it was close enough to get me there.
    By the way, Audacity is free too... and a fantastic audio editor.

    With a 33-minute mp3 audio file, I used Audacity to convert it to a WAV file.  WAV is uncompressed, and will always play the audio at a consistent bitrate.  Mp3 is compressed, making it hard to match video clips with perfect timing.  When the whole video is just a single photo it doesn't really matter, but old habits die hard.
    From the Wav file, I edited it down to "Goodbye World Goodbye", equalized the audio trying to highlight the piano and de-emphasize the crowd noises, and exported it as a 32-bit Wav.

    Then back to HitFilm.  Create a project, import the Wav file, drag it into the timeline.  Import the photo, drag into the timeline, stretch the photo duration until it's equal to the audio track.  (It will snap in place when it gets close enough to the audio duration.)  Export the video to hard drive, upload to Youtube, and done.

    I'm still searching for the original raw footage of Freil playing on Hi-8 tape.  Once it's found, I'll have to obtain a Hi-8 player.  My plan is to buy an old one for $200-$250 from eBay, use it for any Hi-8 tapes I have (Not just Freil's, but any I may still find in all those old boxes.)  Then re-sell it on eBay.  It may not break even but at least I won't be out a couple of hundred dollars!

EZCap is outdated, but there's a better way to transfer video to computer

    Though I was able to transfer video using EZCap in the past, I can't recommend it.  It was a pain to get working all those years ago, and now it's not working for me at all.
    The best way I've found to transfer that footage into computer (meaning "effective, yet cheap") costs about $50 from things easily found on Amazon, plus some free software, all of it compatible with an ordinary computer running current Windows.  You'll notice I'm fond of free.  In this case, the list of items, along with a video explaining how to do it, was created by a YouTuber named "JUMBLE."

    There's not much sense in me duplicating his work.  And I don't want to divert his Amazon links for the items you'll need, that's very likely a source of income for him.  So, go watch his short, interesting, and truly informative video, "VCR to Computer - How to connect, watch and record old VHS tapes."  It's well worth the few minutes.  He doesn't add "fluff" to his videos.  It's all solid info.  He provides links to all the hardware, making it very easy to follow his instructions.

    

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.  :^)