- Confidence
- Comfort
- Character
- Conviction
Music is one of those pursuits that we undertake without necessarily expecting for the journey to end - that's part of what I love about being a musician. But in spite of all of my noble desires to keep improving it can be so difficult to keep the inspiration alive in our own little bubble. To step back and to objectively hear ourselves, to dream and get into our heads what we're capable of, and to push ourselves farther than we imagined possible takes a certain amount of humility and bravery. I've been fortunate over the years to have had several pianist friends for whom I feel comfortable playing and it's a practice I highly recommend. Sometimes it can be good as creatives to push ourselves out of our comfort zone and to get good and truly nervous playing for others before performing in front of more people. It can also be a way of proving to ourselves that we are capable of performing under pressure and that we can learn and grow, just as we did as students.
Over the past few years I was given a chance to do just that. One day, out of the blue, I received a private message on Twitter from a pianist who I had long considered my Bach hero. He had written to ask if I'd like to start chatting about Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier since he was working through them himself in preparation for an upcoming recording. Needless to say I was a bit surprised because of who I am - a professional pianist, yes, but one without any recordings and without a huge name or career. In spite of my initial surprise about it all, I accepted his invitation, we met for an initial chat, and we haven't stopped talking since.
I will never forget the first time he asked to hear me play something during one of our conversations. Oh my. I can't adequately describe how nervous I was! But I knew this was a really unique opportunity and that it would be foolish to chicken out. Through our short exchanges of musical ideas, I quickly learned, not to my surprise, what an incredible musician, coach, teacher, and mentor he is. Over the months, those mini-exchanges with him through our video chats evolved into me sending videos of my playing to him in return for feedback. He in turn asked thought-provoking questions, challenged me to truly own my performances and interpretation of any given piece, and helped me to hear subtleties in my playing that may or not reflect what I have going on in my head.
My musical mentor has also been watching my weekly piano sightreading since I began streaming them at the beginning of the pandemic. At the start of it all I found myself a regular bundle of nerves because he regularly passed on comments to me about very specific things I could do better even in that context. I admit that at first I responded with a bit of a short temper. I felt that because I was sightreading I shouldn’t be expected to play in such a finessed way. I believe I even suggested that perhaps he could sit in the hot seat for one episode if he thought what he was asking for was possible. This mini tantrum on my part led to an interesting discussion and me realizing, after cooling down and a bit more processing, that perhaps it was possible after all. And guess what? It is. My show is now even more of a joy to do because I’m loving the constant challenge to up my game musically every time, whether it’s on my show or out in the real world.
After two years of being gifted this experience, I now feel like a brand new musician: my practicing is different; my performing is different; every aspect of how I hear music is different and more fine-tuned. My confidence has also increased more than I could have ever imagined. As a teacher, I’ve added even more things to my toolbox to listen for when working with students. More importantly, perhaps, I'm inspired again to keep pushing myself to get even better and I feel like I have the ears and heart to do so.
For various reasons I’m keeping the identity of my musical mentor mysterious. As evidenced by the current show, “The Masked Singer,” it seems folks like a little intrigue and suspense now and then. Consider this my personal (and much more entertaining) version of the show. And if you're interested or curious to learn more about who he is, let me know. I just may let you in on my little secret.
When Sandra and I started the Piano Music She Wrote project in 2020 we knew that we’d be constantly looking for ways to improve the different aspects of our social media output. It wasn’t long after we launched our YouTube channel that we noticed that links in our social media posts to videos on our channel often seemed to disappear into a blackhole. Sometimes a preview of the video would appear in the post but more often than not just the link would show. It seemed that there were some posts that hardly anyone clicked on and our videos on YouTube weren’t being viewed as much as we’d hoped they would be.
These days, it’s all about the visual. A text-only post is more often than not overlooked. We quickly realized we needed to be presenting and promoting our videos in a different way. Gabriella di Laccio, the founder of the fantastic website, Donne - Women in Music, suggested that we post short clips of our videos along with the link to the full video on our YouTube channel. She had found this small addition was crucial in insuring that Donne’s videos were seen by more people. With the frequency and number of videos we post, I wanted to find a way to make these clips that was easy, fast, dependable, and usable by both Sandra and myself. An internet search thankfully led me to Kapwing, an online desktop app that has quickly become one of the most important tools in our toolbox.
Besides having an adorable cat icon as their logo, Kapwing is all of those things we were looking for. I now use it on an almost daily basis. Here are some examples of how I’ve used it so far. It’ll give you a taste of how you can use it.
Basic video clipping and branding for social media
To produce our teasers for use on Twitter and Instagram all we have to do is copy the url of our YouTube video into the Kapwing upload page, press return and then presto! We are taken to the editing screen with the video ready to edit. We trim off what we want, add in our logo and then export. From there I usually download the file to my computer but you could also share a link, or share to social media without having to take up space on your computer. These days it takes me about 3-5 minutes from start to finish to prepare one of these clips. Gone are the days of waiting an hour to export a video file! I think it’s important to add here that Kapwing makes it easy to crop any video to work best for any given social media platform and it also works with Canva, which is an online graphics app that I also highly recommend. You can plop you're clip into a graphic post your putting together there and you’ve got something even fancier!
More extensive editing options - combining multiple clips and text
After I had used the platform a bit I started looking into some of their other editing options. My next project was to string together several shorter videos into one longer one, overlaying text on top of the video to clearly label the pieces I was performing. This was also easy to do and the end result was really fantastic.
Next I tried my hand at making a promo video for my Sightreading Maverick show to post on social media. I added text and images along with the video this time. Again, really straight-forward and I’ve used it every week since. I think it’s been instrumental in spreading the word about my show. People seem more likely to retweet it than had I just posted a text only or a text and image post.
In conclusion…
Kapwing has been such a lifesaver for us! I’m convinced that the video clips we’ve produced through their app has significantly increased our visibility on social media. It’s easy to use, full of handy tools that enable us to produce high quality output, it can also be used for free, although there are some limitations regarding file size and length of video that you can originally upload into Kapwing. To have more flexibility you can upgrade to a paid level or you can look into their various programs to help out with the cost. From our interactions with them I can assure you there are actual people running the app and they clearly believe in the service they are offering. Yet another reason to support this great app! Don't hesitate to reach out to them.
You can find their webpage at: