I’m a tad pressed for time this week, what with the big Music Festival coming up for my students on Thursday. It’s a flurry of activity for yours portly, so I have a very short little snippet for this week’s edition of Open Mic Adventures.
Regular readers will know of my red tardy slip composing project. My students have largely been showing up to school on time lately—drat!—so I haven’t had occasion to pen many more miniatures, but I do have a short one that is a bit lively and fun.
Here we are—the second Bandcamp Friday of 2023!
The first Friday of a bunch of months this year—February, March, April, May, August, September, October, November, and December—will feature this pro-indie music observance, a day on which Bandcamp waives its usual 15% commission on sales.
In other words, when you buy my music, almost 100% of it goes to me, instead of almost 85%.
Currently, my entire discography of ten releases is $9.50, a savings of 45%, which is not bad for ten releases. That’s $0.95 per release—not too shabby! To purchase the full discography, click on any release, and you’ll see the option to purchase all of them.
I’m also selling all of my paintings for $10, with free shipping in the United States, regardless of how many you purchase. They’re one of kind, so once a painting is purchased, it’s gone.
But here’s the exciting news: I’ve joined Society6, a website that lets artists upload their designs, which can they be printed onto all manner of products (like this throw pillow, or this duvet cover). Why not get a bookbag with a mouthy droid on it?
I only get 10% of the sales made there, but some of the stuff looks really good—I really want these notebooks with my “Desert View” painting on it (which again, is just $10 for the one-and-only original). Some of them are straight-up goofy, like this church doodle I made celebrating the presidential pardon of Roger Stone (the description for the piece is “Anger your friends with this doodle commemorating the presidential pardon of America’s most dapper political operative“).
I haven’t done any new painting lately, but I do have two new doodles for just $5 each: Robo Talk 23 No. 1 and No. 2. I’m also working on quite a few more doodles for Society6, which will also end up here.
Finally, my book The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot is $10 in paperback, and just $5 on Kindle.
Thanks again for your support!
Happy Friday!
—TPP
There’s something about these winter doldrums that always get my creative juices flowing, and I’ve embarked upon a new composing project, which I wrote about briefly last week. Piano miniatures—and mine are mini-miniatures—are a fun way to attempt to express a musical idea in a very brief format, much like “flash fiction” or very short stories.
Last year I penned Péchés d’âge moyen and a short sequel, then my composing pen laid fallow for much of the rest of the year. I’ve sketched out a few short pieces that will eventually (probably, maybe) make it into Pdam III, but nothing with the drive and focus of the original and its shorter follow-up.
Then I hit upon the idea of taking the small red tardy slips that students bring to class and composing short pieces on that very small physical medium. I now have a small stack, and it makes for a fun way of composing first drafts.
With that mini-project in the works—it’s perfect because I can take five minutes even on a busy day to jot down a few bars of music—I thought it might be fun to look back to the origins of what would become Péchés d’âge moyen. As my red tardy slips project suggests, there are frequently “arbitrary and absurd sources for inspiration.”
Well, at least for yours portly.
With that, here is 8 February 2022’s ” Composing Humorous Miniatures“:
It’s Valentine’s Day, a day for love and cuddling—or, perhaps, for sobbing gently while eating doughnuts over the kitchen sink. In this day and age, there is no wrong answer.
Well, there is one wrong answer: not picking up Electrock Retrospective, Volume II: Technological Romance—celebrating its tenth anniversary today—for the very romantic price of $2.14.
Readers will know that I have been featuring pieces from my modern classical piano project, Péchés d’âge moyen, which I released on 4 March 2022. I’ve finally begun a new, albeit amorphous, composing project, based on the kind of quirky premise you folks have come to expect from yours portly.
My school gives students little red tardy slips to bring to class, typically when they turn up late to the first period class. My High School Music Ensemble meets in the morning, so it’s not unusual to have a few students—especially the ones that can drive—show up late.
I hit upon the idea of composing very short musical themes or motifs based on the tardy students’ personalities (at least loosely).
The very first such composition was all of two measures. I’ve expanded them a bit since then, but they’re all fairly short—typically fewer than eight measures. I love the piano miniature format (the flash fiction of music!), and it’s fun to jot these down, and then play them back to the amusement of the tardy student.
For the past three editions of Open Mic Adventures I’ve been featuring pieces from my modern classical piano project, Péchés d’âge moyen, which I released on 4 March 2022. I’ve been unable to get out to open mic night since school and lessons have geared back up, so I figured I’d dip into the portly video archives to bring back some goodness.
I also really liked this composing project, and I think I came up with some good material If you haven’t already, you can pick it up for a buck. I’ve got another piano miniatures composing project in the works, but more on that another time.
Regardless, I thought I’d take a break from the movie review retrospectives and look back at those three recent editions of Open Mic Adventures, all dedicated to pianistic noodling:
Happy Sunday—and Happy Listening!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
It’s back! It’s the first Bandcamp Friday of 2023!
The first Friday of a bunch of months this year—February, March, April, May, August, September, October, November, and December—will feature this pro-indie music observance, a day on which Bandcamp waives its usual 15% commission on sales.
In other words, when you buy my music, almost 100% of it goes to me, instead of almost 85%.
Currently, my entire discography of ten releases is $9.50, a savings of 45%, which is not bad for ten releases. That’s $0.95 per release—not too shabby! To purchase the full discography, click on any release, and you’ll see the option to purchase all of them.
I’m also selling all of my paintings for $10, with free shipping in the United States, regardless of how many you purchase. They’re one of kind, so once a painting is purchased, it’s gone.
I haven’t done any new painting lately, but I do have two new doodles for just $5 each: Robo Talk 23 No. 1 and No. 2.
Finally, my book The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot is $10 in paperback, and just $5 on Kindle.
Thanks again for your support!
Happy Friday!
—TPP
For the second consecutive edition of Open Mic Adventures, I’m diving back into 2022 and pieces from my my modern classical piano project, Péchés d’âge moyen, which I released on 4 March 2022. This week, I’m featuring one of my favorite pieces, “Satiean Motion.”
It’s been a bit since I’ve been able to get back to an open mic, between school, Christmas, and illness. Belting out the tunes is pretty tough when your voice is a froggy mess of croaks and squeaks (although I’m sure some people are into that kind of thing).
As such, I decided to cast about through the Portly Video Archives and pull out some golden chestnuts from yesteryear—or, in this case, something I recorded about eleven months ago.
Readers might recall my modern classical piano project, Péchés d’âge moyen, which I released on 4 March 2022. It was a frivolous and fun little project that, like most such things, was born of “an absurd, self-indulgent inside joke,” according to the album listing on Bandcamp.
The recordings were pretty lo-fi, but some of the pieces are actually quite good (others are self-indulgent experiments in multimeter quasi-tonality). I also loaded the digital Bandcamp album with tons of extras—including the video you’re about to see—like scans of the handwritten manuscripts and scores for each piece.
The Portly Politico 