MIDI Heaven

I made a deliberate decision not to waste time while my daughter was awake on chores or on my own hobbies. So last night I left a sink full of dishes and we went off to find a park (our dishwasher is broken, or rather I've become the dishwasher. :-) We had a wonderful little park over at Greeboro community center, but they tore it down in order to put up a library. I loved this park - the Arab women would sit and chat at the picnic bench while their kids chased one another, the Asian grandmothers would be pushing their young ones on the baby swings while singing to them, and the kids of many different origins who lived in the houses looking out on the park's walkway would run through the sprinklers over and over again, narrowly avoiding the flying bicycles of their older brothers. It was like getting to watch a vibrant Norman Rockwell painting unfold before me, updated with the rich multicultural fabric of my neighbourhood. Now its gone.

So we wandered down Greenboro the road, looking for the way over to another nearby park. I realized too late that Greenboro doesn't open on this park, but my daughter informed me you can get there through her school. So we walked up to her school, wandered through the migrating herds of soccer players in the soccer field, and walked towards the other park. We reminisced about the time we saw the hot air balloon crash land in the park, taking out a street lamp in the process. I remembered how I had cynically thought at the time that the city would leave the lamp broken for years, but to their credit, they did not.

When I finally got her off to bed (a more and more difficult thing to do as she gets older), I set to work on a song I've been composing on the laptop. I've discovered the joys of MIDI programming. Now I am mostly a guitar player. I am no concert pianist, though my piano playing skills are sufficient to provide ambience on some of the songs I've recorded. But I discovered a few months ago that I know how to read and write musical notation (I was surprised as anyone, but I guess I did pay attention during those grade school lessons.) So using the computer, I can compose music on a staff, convert it to something called MIDI, and then the computer can make the music I've composed sound like pretty much any instrument. So I've turned a guitar tune I wrote into more of an electric piano number, something stylistically similar to that old 70s song 'Dreamweaver.'

I'm kind of informally planning to turn some of this recording I'm doing into a CD, and then releasing it locally. Maybe. Depends how ambitious I am. I wanted to have at least one song on the disc be more than a guitar tune. Looks like I might have that now...