If you were in church on Sunday, you heard me play the video in the link below. It’s from a band called “The Arcadian Wild” and I’ve had their album on repeat for the past month or so. I was thrilled to see that they have sheet music available for sale for the instrumental track on their album. I bought it to support them and then realized that the piece was pretty far over my head.
I wish I had a recording of my first attempt. It probably took me 10 minutes to get through the whole thing and the result was almost unrecognizable. I played probably played this 200-300 times over the course of a month, and it was really fun to be along for the ride as my muscles would develop the required memory and different parts would start to click. That happens with every piece I learn, but I really noticed it with this one. I, of course, didn’t get a perfect version on video, but every once in a while I make it through without errors.
Anyway, here’s my recording of the piece, but you can find it on Spotify and other music services if you want to hear the real version.
Update: A few years later, I revisited this and memorized it. Below is a new recording that has better audio since I was recording digitally instead of with cheap microphones.
Smoke Forecast
Seattle is in the midst of some record-breaking bad air quality due to the wildfires in British Columbia, eastern Washington and California. Unless the wind is blowing form the west, it gets smokey in Seattle and an inversion layer traps the smoke down here between the mountains.
There are a couple handy sites for helping to check how bad it is right now and how it’s going to look in the future. The first is the Puget Sound Clean Air site. It shows a short timeline of the particle count in the air.
The second is an experimental forecast from NOAA that predicts where the smoke will be going. Choose your overlay on the top left and then choose the hour of the forecast on the bottom left. (Note that if you slide it all the way to the right it appears to jump back in time.) The forecast only goes out about 24 hours, but, for example, today you can at least have some hope that tomorrow will be a little better.