Jonathan Pytell

Clavinova Love

I am a pretty serious piano snob so a lot of people have been surprised that I bought a Yamaha Clavinova about 6 months back. I came to this conclusion because I live in an apartment and I sometimes like to wake up at 3AM and play my little heart out. When I used to do this with my (very loud and very awesome) baby grand it resulted in nasty phone calls making me feel I was doing something bad when I was making music which is supposed to be making me feel good. Musical bad mojo is hard to shake and is to be avoided in my opinion. Once again, just like my high school guidance counselor warned me, life is all about trade offs and here I had to make an important one. I decided that I was willing to give up a certain amount of 'piano-ness' in order to retain the freedom to play whenever I want. There are others who would say that they would NEVER have purchased a digital piano over an acoustic but my guess is most of these people don't actually play a lot of piano at 3AM nor do they live in an apartment. It is easy to to have rigid idealistic beliefs when you are not in the trenches. I have not regretted this decision one bit and it turns out the trade-offs were minor. The Clavinova is not an acoustic piano but it is damn close. To put it in terms we can all understand, the Clavinova is not that sad inflatable sex doll that Hopper drags around in Blue Velvet. No this is a true Cylon - a piece of technology that can actually 'pass' for the real thing in many applications including recording. It feels very good to play, is always perfectly in tune and I can play with headphones on at a satisfying volume any time I want. ...and I do. So take that Mrs Ratouche in 1C! You, Madame, will no longer hamper my musical creativity you intolerant music-hating nightsleeper! Frankly, I pity you.

There are a lot of models of Clavinovas out there. The number of models is actually ridiculously confusing and seems rather excessive but Yamaha must know what they are doing. I ended up going with the CLP-240 which is a mid-level model that has the good piano touch and nice speakers without a lot of extra features like tons of silly sounds, room character-sensing digital effects and cruise control. Highly recommended.

Tracktion - still cheap and great

I met a smart software guy in London when I was living over there in 2001. Over several beers at the pub he discussed his plans to develop recording software that would get out of the way of the musician. We talked about how frustrating it is to grapple with pro music recording software and learn all of the various screens, configs and nonsensical toolsets when you just want to get down and be a music geek instead of a computer geek and bang out some tracks. Why is it that these expensive software packages with all of their power and sophistication insist on trying to emulate analog devices with wood grain surfaces and tiny knobs that you can barely turn with a mouse? What's with all of the different windows? Why is everything so 'gadgety'? A couple of years later this guy released Tracktion. It went on to become quite famous for its simple power and intuitive single screen interface. I use it often. Thanks for making great music software Julian.

PZM live piano miking

I decided a while back that it would be fun to record my steady piano gig. I thought it would be good for my playing to listen to what I was doing after the fact and I also hoped that I just might capture the odd moment. I have a nice portable DAT machine but the problem was figuring out how to set up a couple of mikes. This is a pretty suboptimal recording situation to say the least. The room can be pretty loud. I came to the conclusion that the best way to deal with this was the trusty Realistic PZM. These were inexpensive mikes made by Crown for Radio Shack in the 80s that have maintained a loyal cult following because they sound amazingly good. I had one lying around from when I was in High School and just grabbed another one on eBay. They really do an amazing job isolating the piano if i record with these guys taped onto the lid and the lid closed. Things do sound a little "boxy" but the stereo separation is good and I think I can do some postproduction to make it sound a little less like I am playing in a coffin. Apparently you can convert these things to run on Phantom Power but I haven't done that yet.