Sunday, October 19, 2014

New Handpan Composition: In Her Travel Shoes

My latest handpan composition that I played in between sets with my band, Jack Versus The Crab. I was meaning to make a video of me playing the piece at home. But this came out decent. I do need to play it a little tighter next time.

The piece was inspired by a girl that I know. She was brave to take a solo trip to Vietnam for vacation. She would tell me about the places she's headed to and all the tasty dishes she's tried.  She would run into glitches in her plans. But would somehow find solutions for them.

So I thought about how it would feel to breathe in the air over there. How it would feel like to see all the places she went to. And to taste all that sumptuous food. Hence the title of this handpan composition.

I initially zoom cropped this video while I was editing it. But I decided not to in the end. The little girl dancing around while I was playing was too cute to cut out.





I also pasted the first part of this post on the YouTube video's description. But I'll continue my thoughts here in the blog. Hopefully you weren't too distracted with the baby walking around everywhere, that you actually noticed my playing. Haha

I feel pretty good about the piece. There's this kick ass Australian handpan player named Adrian Portia that I've come to befriend on Facebook. I always admired the speed and precision of his playing. And of course as all other handpan players that know him, we all want to learn his techniques. It so happens one of those techniques I already knew; right handed triplets. All I had to do was to play 3 different notes instead of just 2 notes, with one note repeated twice. Varying the 3 notes like you would with chords and tadaaaa, then came out the starting and ending parts of the piece.

I'm not a learned musician as I always say in this blog. But it feels good to know that I can still slightly improve even with what little I know.

All of my handpan compositions so far were about what I was going through or what I was feeling. So this marks the first time that I wrote a piece about someone else. I'd like to thank the girl I mentioned someday. It got me out of my creative rut. And even though there are still things weighing heavily on me, she sure made it a little lighter to carry. If I don't get to thank her, I'll just smile to myself and be glad that for a while, she helped me peck a hole in this thick shell of mine.


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