(from the Yamaha MusicUSA blog)Thanks to longitme DEN enthusiast (DEN-thusiast?) Stella Sick, The Cincinnati Orchestra, and Australian piano roll enthusiast and digital music engineer Peter Phillips, George Gershwin appeared in a posthoumous performance earlier this year. This is no ghost story. Rather, it’s a tale of technology.Gershwin’s piano part had actually been recorded in 1924 on piano rolls for the then-popular Duo-Art reproducing piano. Phillips converted the performance to MIDI data, using a machine he built himself, for other live performance projects way back in 2013.  It sounds relatively simple, but in fact it was extremely challenging and labor-intensive to reproduce Gershwin’s part accurately and to make it possible for the conductor, Louis Langrée, and the orchestra to follow along with it. Check out the full story on the YamahaUSA Blog! 

Call your favorite piano tuner, connect your high-def TVs, make sure your DisklavierTV subscription is up-to-date, and invite ALL your piano-loving friends, for the time of the 2018 e-Competition is upon us! From May 19-May 31, 2018, Disklavier owners, DEN-stitutions, and Yamaha piano dealers will be treated to almost a fortnight of the world's most beloved piano repertoire, played by the world's most competitive emerging keyboard artists. 

Mario Ajero, Assistant Professor of Piano Pedagogy at the Stephen F. Austin State University, is well known for his popular Piano Podcast. These instructional videos leverage features of the Disklavier and connectivity to interactive, instructional graphics that are displayed on the computer screen. In this video, he provides some insights into the capabilities of his favorite video editor called ScreenFlow.

Please join the DEN team (and lots of other great Yamaha folks!) at the 2018 Conference of the Music Teachers' National Association (MTNA)! For many teachers, this is a rare opportunity to get hands-on time exploring Disklavier, as well as a representative sampling of many other Yamaha products, including the two highly acclaimed concert grands, the Yamaha CFX and the brand new Bösendorfer 280VC. Best of all, Yamaha's team of experts will be on hand to answer your questions and show you the latest tips and tricks from our vast community of musicians and educators. We are especially excited to present three insightful and engaging colleagues for our Yamaha showcase: Dennis Alexander, Chris Renaud-Cogswell, and Prof. Mario Ajero will be sharing their own unique strategies for using Clavinova, Disklavier, Hybrid Pianos and more! Please join us Monday, March 19th, at 1PM in the Monterrey Room for this very special presentation. We'll see you in Florida!

In 1916, the year before his untimely death, Scott Joplin recorded 7 piano rolls. These rolls were recorded during a period in which the concept of “hand-played rolls” was still being developed.

Regrettably, several factors undermined Joplin’s recordings. For starters, the recording technology was limited to capturing the start and stop times of notes as well as the up/down positions of the sustain pedal. No dynamics were captured. In the case of the Connorized rolls that he recorded, the temporal resolution of the holes in the paper was rather course, and apparently the roll editors further quantized Joplin's playing.