John French
Author and Musician
The Piano Saga
31/03/24 20:42
Two months ago I was struck by a peculiar realization: My experience with making music for almost all of the last fifteen years has been through a laptop.
There's nothing wrong with this. There's an enormous world of music production hardware and software, an awful lot of which is highly accessible to anybody with a moderately powerful laptop, decent set of headphones, and bit of regular disposable income. Endless sonic exploration and construction can fit in a backpack. Digital audio workstation software such as Cubase, Logic, and Studio One are incredible environments for translating the sound in your head into complex compositions that can be refined and tweaked and arranged until you fall asleep over the keyboard at three in the morning, that one not-quite-catchy-enough section stuck in your thoughts.
But while fitting all that in your bag and being able to make music wherever life takes you is a gratifying reassurance, especially in your nomadic years, it had a very particular consequence for my relationship with music: I was spending so much of my "music time" on crafting a better tune, rather than intuitively inventing one. The tools themselves provided so much detail and precision that I was barely spending any time on actually composing music, and spending a heck of a lot more on arranging and shaping what I had put together. When you create and distribute your own work, you're responsible for not just composing and performing/programming it, but also mixing and mastering it, which are lengthy, iterative processes all their own. And now, with my time constrained by work, parenthood, and other hobbies (like making any progress on a third book), I was realistically having trouble even putting together one new piece of music a year, and most of that would be spent on refinement, not improvisation or discovery, which are much more fun.
I decided that this was not the relationship I wanted with music. When I was a kid, up through my teenage years, I was put through piano lessons across a few different teachers. Some of those relationships went better than others (thanks Marcus, sorry Sharon). I wasn't a great pianist, but the soulfulness of the instrument and a plentiful helping of music theory stuck with me. I decided having a piano in the house was the right move to make to rediscover the joy of simply being able to play, without any fiddling or friction.
My home is not large enough for a grand piano, even a small one. It just isn't (UK homes are small). An upright just about made sense - I trawled the Piano World forums for well-liked models. Despite much of the consensus being "Don't ask the internet, try it in person you idiot", there were a few modern models from different brands that seemed to be universally recommended. At the same time I saw some high regard for digital pianos, but having last meaningfully been exposed to the things more than ten years earlier, I was skeptical.
I made my way around a handful of showrooms, and tried out a number of instruments. I learned a couple things:
1) The acoustic upright pianos that I wanted to take home consistently cost 2-3x my budget. I took a real liking to Kawai's lineup (especially the K-200, what a delightfully complex tone) - there was a Danemann that I found pleasant as well. But I have little appetite for negotiating price on something like this, and that part of the experience left me less-than-excited.
2) Digital pianos have (mostly) evolved quite a lot since I last encountered them.
I sampled digital options from Yamaha, Kawai, and Roland. Nord, despite producing very interesting options, was out of the running as they didn't seem to provide the 'furniture appliance' experience, and no dealers within a sane range offered anything from Casio.
Here is my evaluation of the various options:
Yamaha's Clavinova line seemed nice at first glance, but this luster faded quickly. The keybeds were adequate, but the quality of the sample sets and cabinet speakers produced a distinctly artificial tone, a bit muffled at best, flat at worst. Together with controls that evoked a 2003 TV remote vibe, the experiences of the CLP-735 and CLP-745 were not great.
Kawai's 2024 CA series had some interesting quirks. The keybeds were terrific, and the newest sample sets were of a higher quality than what Yamaha had to offer. The cabinet speakers across their lineup ranged from "decent" to "actually rather good". The controls were nearly as clunky as those on the Yamaha offerings. I think if my search had ended there I might have ended up taking home a CA-401 and felt good about it.
But then it was over to Roland. The keybeds were nice, to my fingers maybe a slight step back from Kawai, and the controls seemed a little more intuitive to my eyes. The sound they produced had a distinct 'feel' from the other two brands; the reason for this is that when it comes to piano simulation, the other models available under £2000 rely on complex sample sets (essentially libraries of micro-recordings of real pianos that are triggered and combined in response to the player). Roland's options instead rely on a modeling approach, where the instrument synthesizes a custom piano tone that's tailored to your taste and space. With some easy tinkering it made the instrument feel alive, and that was very interesting.
(I should note that build quality was impeccable across all three manufacturers. When you're paying over a thousand pounds for an instrument you expect it to be well made, and nobody disappointed on this front.)
The emotional, calming delight of communing with an instrument is essential part of the musical experience, and finding it in a digital instrument surprised me. Ultimately I found it in three such digital instruments during my tour, and I took home the cheapest of them: a Roland HP704. The other two - a bigger, more expensive Roland LX model and a significantly more expensive Kawai - were both very nice, but I'd found my sweet spot.
Having lived with it for a little while now, I have notes for the fine people at Roland, but none of true consequence. It's well-made, feels great to play, and has made family and guests pause to indulge in its house-filling sound from even the most random noodling sessions. It can act as a top-notch MIDI controller for those times I want to bring out the laptop. But most of all, it's simply been fun to have a piano right there in the house, ready to bring a dull moment of the day to life with no notice at all. And sometimes I'll catch my kids opening it to dawdle on the black and whites completely unprompted. I can't ask for more than that.
There's nothing wrong with this. There's an enormous world of music production hardware and software, an awful lot of which is highly accessible to anybody with a moderately powerful laptop, decent set of headphones, and bit of regular disposable income. Endless sonic exploration and construction can fit in a backpack. Digital audio workstation software such as Cubase, Logic, and Studio One are incredible environments for translating the sound in your head into complex compositions that can be refined and tweaked and arranged until you fall asleep over the keyboard at three in the morning, that one not-quite-catchy-enough section stuck in your thoughts.
But while fitting all that in your bag and being able to make music wherever life takes you is a gratifying reassurance, especially in your nomadic years, it had a very particular consequence for my relationship with music: I was spending so much of my "music time" on crafting a better tune, rather than intuitively inventing one. The tools themselves provided so much detail and precision that I was barely spending any time on actually composing music, and spending a heck of a lot more on arranging and shaping what I had put together. When you create and distribute your own work, you're responsible for not just composing and performing/programming it, but also mixing and mastering it, which are lengthy, iterative processes all their own. And now, with my time constrained by work, parenthood, and other hobbies (like making any progress on a third book), I was realistically having trouble even putting together one new piece of music a year, and most of that would be spent on refinement, not improvisation or discovery, which are much more fun.
I decided that this was not the relationship I wanted with music. When I was a kid, up through my teenage years, I was put through piano lessons across a few different teachers. Some of those relationships went better than others (thanks Marcus, sorry Sharon). I wasn't a great pianist, but the soulfulness of the instrument and a plentiful helping of music theory stuck with me. I decided having a piano in the house was the right move to make to rediscover the joy of simply being able to play, without any fiddling or friction.
My home is not large enough for a grand piano, even a small one. It just isn't (UK homes are small). An upright just about made sense - I trawled the Piano World forums for well-liked models. Despite much of the consensus being "Don't ask the internet, try it in person you idiot", there were a few modern models from different brands that seemed to be universally recommended. At the same time I saw some high regard for digital pianos, but having last meaningfully been exposed to the things more than ten years earlier, I was skeptical.
I made my way around a handful of showrooms, and tried out a number of instruments. I learned a couple things:
1) The acoustic upright pianos that I wanted to take home consistently cost 2-3x my budget. I took a real liking to Kawai's lineup (especially the K-200, what a delightfully complex tone) - there was a Danemann that I found pleasant as well. But I have little appetite for negotiating price on something like this, and that part of the experience left me less-than-excited.
2) Digital pianos have (mostly) evolved quite a lot since I last encountered them.
I sampled digital options from Yamaha, Kawai, and Roland. Nord, despite producing very interesting options, was out of the running as they didn't seem to provide the 'furniture appliance' experience, and no dealers within a sane range offered anything from Casio.
Here is my evaluation of the various options:
Yamaha's Clavinova line seemed nice at first glance, but this luster faded quickly. The keybeds were adequate, but the quality of the sample sets and cabinet speakers produced a distinctly artificial tone, a bit muffled at best, flat at worst. Together with controls that evoked a 2003 TV remote vibe, the experiences of the CLP-735 and CLP-745 were not great.
Kawai's 2024 CA series had some interesting quirks. The keybeds were terrific, and the newest sample sets were of a higher quality than what Yamaha had to offer. The cabinet speakers across their lineup ranged from "decent" to "actually rather good". The controls were nearly as clunky as those on the Yamaha offerings. I think if my search had ended there I might have ended up taking home a CA-401 and felt good about it.
But then it was over to Roland. The keybeds were nice, to my fingers maybe a slight step back from Kawai, and the controls seemed a little more intuitive to my eyes. The sound they produced had a distinct 'feel' from the other two brands; the reason for this is that when it comes to piano simulation, the other models available under £2000 rely on complex sample sets (essentially libraries of micro-recordings of real pianos that are triggered and combined in response to the player). Roland's options instead rely on a modeling approach, where the instrument synthesizes a custom piano tone that's tailored to your taste and space. With some easy tinkering it made the instrument feel alive, and that was very interesting.
(I should note that build quality was impeccable across all three manufacturers. When you're paying over a thousand pounds for an instrument you expect it to be well made, and nobody disappointed on this front.)
The emotional, calming delight of communing with an instrument is essential part of the musical experience, and finding it in a digital instrument surprised me. Ultimately I found it in three such digital instruments during my tour, and I took home the cheapest of them: a Roland HP704. The other two - a bigger, more expensive Roland LX model and a significantly more expensive Kawai - were both very nice, but I'd found my sweet spot.
Having lived with it for a little while now, I have notes for the fine people at Roland, but none of true consequence. It's well-made, feels great to play, and has made family and guests pause to indulge in its house-filling sound from even the most random noodling sessions. It can act as a top-notch MIDI controller for those times I want to bring out the laptop. But most of all, it's simply been fun to have a piano right there in the house, ready to bring a dull moment of the day to life with no notice at all. And sometimes I'll catch my kids opening it to dawdle on the black and whites completely unprompted. I can't ask for more than that.
On AR and ChatGPT
29/03/23 10:24
Two weeks ago I bought an Apple Watch and after four days returned it without a second thought. It was a really interesting example of sprinkling a little augmented reality on top of everyday life.
On day one I mostly played with with the watch; On day two I understood that its appeal was not actually in what features it brought to the table, but that it let me have those features available at all times with no friction. The interaction with technology was, for a few specific features, virtually frictionless in an awesome way. If I wanted music on a drive, I could get into my car, and as I was pulling away just quickly ask my wrist to start playing something by Santana. Before you know it, Evil Ways is coming through the car stereo - and all it took was a lazy request that was forgotten as soon as it was spoken.
It gamified exercise, forwarded notifications to my wrist with a little tap against my skin, let me handle contactless payments, and provided a means to raise my wrist and request a song or dictate a message or whatever other thing from Siri. In fact, Siri was the key to the whole thing's appeal; here was a thing with all the casual presence of a Star Trek comm badge that could respond to my whims. But, like Siri has always done, the limits of it quickly emerge when you have to know in advance how to phrase each request, and decide what your request needs to be. "Play me something chilled, erm, no, actually instrumental and relaxing" is understandable to any human, but Siri is challenged by it. Similarly, while I could ask Siri to send a chat message on my behalf, the phrasing was odd: I had to start the command by addressing Siri, but halfway through switch the command to addressing the message recipient. “Tell my wife I’ll be at her mother’s house at three” ends up sending my wife, “I’ll be at her mother’s place at three”. It took a bit of learning and never quite felt right; being conversational with the request to Siri collided with Siri being extremely literal in the dictation.
On day three I decided that, compared to just pulling my phone out of my pocket, removing friction for a few things and introducing new friction for other things wasn't quite worth £300. On day four I went back to the Apple store and got the money back.
I think Augmented Reality, that sibling technology to Virtual Reality, has intoxicating potential to make features we take for granted in our devices today seem that much more magical. I came across this recently: AR Ski Goggles, which are already bulky (good to hide the tech) and have pretty obvious use cases (good to work out useful features): Augmented Reality Ski Goggles (kottke.org)
It got me thinking: If you're gonna chase augmented reality, you need to make the technology an ergonomically and mentally weightless addition to the 'dumb' world.
AR is not strictly about putting a virtual world over the current one, but about making virtual interactions accessible from non-virtual contexts. The Watch was almost great at this. And that I think is where ChatGPT's conversational capabilities will contribute. Ten years ago "smart" assistants were enormous piles of stateless if() statements trying to parse your speech, match it to a database of pre-written statements, and spitting back a formulaic response or action in return. An Amazon Echo you buy today is still working that way.
Arguably we’ve all faced challenges talking to somebody from a different cultural background; we might both be speaking English but that doesn’t mean we’re able to understand each other. I would put interactions with voice assistants currently in this same category of frustration. The need to learn a particular vocabulary to interact with your technology is ultimately frustrating; what seems weightless at a glance doesn’t stay that way for long. We've seen more public progress in solving that challenge from OpenAI in the last three months than in the entirety of the proceeding decade, and I’m looking forward to familiar voice assistants incorporating it. We might not notice when it happens - but when it does, I might go back and try out that Watch again.
On day one I mostly played with with the watch; On day two I understood that its appeal was not actually in what features it brought to the table, but that it let me have those features available at all times with no friction. The interaction with technology was, for a few specific features, virtually frictionless in an awesome way. If I wanted music on a drive, I could get into my car, and as I was pulling away just quickly ask my wrist to start playing something by Santana. Before you know it, Evil Ways is coming through the car stereo - and all it took was a lazy request that was forgotten as soon as it was spoken.
It gamified exercise, forwarded notifications to my wrist with a little tap against my skin, let me handle contactless payments, and provided a means to raise my wrist and request a song or dictate a message or whatever other thing from Siri. In fact, Siri was the key to the whole thing's appeal; here was a thing with all the casual presence of a Star Trek comm badge that could respond to my whims. But, like Siri has always done, the limits of it quickly emerge when you have to know in advance how to phrase each request, and decide what your request needs to be. "Play me something chilled, erm, no, actually instrumental and relaxing" is understandable to any human, but Siri is challenged by it. Similarly, while I could ask Siri to send a chat message on my behalf, the phrasing was odd: I had to start the command by addressing Siri, but halfway through switch the command to addressing the message recipient. “Tell my wife I’ll be at her mother’s house at three” ends up sending my wife, “I’ll be at her mother’s place at three”. It took a bit of learning and never quite felt right; being conversational with the request to Siri collided with Siri being extremely literal in the dictation.
On day three I decided that, compared to just pulling my phone out of my pocket, removing friction for a few things and introducing new friction for other things wasn't quite worth £300. On day four I went back to the Apple store and got the money back.
I think Augmented Reality, that sibling technology to Virtual Reality, has intoxicating potential to make features we take for granted in our devices today seem that much more magical. I came across this recently: AR Ski Goggles, which are already bulky (good to hide the tech) and have pretty obvious use cases (good to work out useful features): Augmented Reality Ski Goggles (kottke.org)
It got me thinking: If you're gonna chase augmented reality, you need to make the technology an ergonomically and mentally weightless addition to the 'dumb' world.
AR is not strictly about putting a virtual world over the current one, but about making virtual interactions accessible from non-virtual contexts. The Watch was almost great at this. And that I think is where ChatGPT's conversational capabilities will contribute. Ten years ago "smart" assistants were enormous piles of stateless if() statements trying to parse your speech, match it to a database of pre-written statements, and spitting back a formulaic response or action in return. An Amazon Echo you buy today is still working that way.
Arguably we’ve all faced challenges talking to somebody from a different cultural background; we might both be speaking English but that doesn’t mean we’re able to understand each other. I would put interactions with voice assistants currently in this same category of frustration. The need to learn a particular vocabulary to interact with your technology is ultimately frustrating; what seems weightless at a glance doesn’t stay that way for long. We've seen more public progress in solving that challenge from OpenAI in the last three months than in the entirety of the proceeding decade, and I’m looking forward to familiar voice assistants incorporating it. We might not notice when it happens - but when it does, I might go back and try out that Watch again.
