Piano Tutorials: 2/27/11

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Sana (Theme from Mutya)

I was trippin' one day and thought of making free sheets for one of the soap operas currently watched in Philippine prime time. This is the theme from Mutya, a soap opera that features a little mermaid type of plot. Filipinos call mermaids "sirena" in the native dialect. I've only posted the first page since I have yet to finish the rest of it. I hope you like it and try it out for yourself. The arrangement is fairly easy to play.

Get the first two pages here. Just skip the ad then choose slow download on the following window. I'll update in a week to add the remaining pages so keep checking! :)

If you're looking for new popular sheet music, you may find them here after signing up.

Monday, February 28, 2011

Alice by Avril Lavigne on Piano

Here's some sheets of Avril Lavigne that I worked on a while back. Theses are relatively easy to play because of the repeating patterns of the left hand. Get the sheets here:

Alice Page 1
Alice Page 2
Alice Page 3
Alice Page 4
Alice Page 5
Alice MP3

For other recent sheet music, you can find some HERE. :)

The Nikon D90 as an alternative

I've owned the Nikon D90 for almost a year now. I've read a lot of reviews for this great camera body so I'll not go to that much of detail for this. I will focus more on how good it is a camera in a consumer point of view.

If you're a bit tight on the budget and can't afford the middle ranged D7000 (the D90's successor), I suggest buying the D90 instead. I haven't had experience using the D7000 but I would say that this D90 is well worth the price.

I was a newbie last year when it came to DSLRs. Still a newbie, but has learned a lot of stuff. The only camera I owned back then was a Sony Cybershot, which was good enough for me as it can shoot 7.1 MP and a very decent video for recording my live youtube music. I wanted to upgrade since I felt I had the passion for photography, so I decided to invest on a DSLR, or digital single lens reflex camera. I didn't want the entry level because I wanted something that's not so common since the SLR market price has gotten really affordable and many people had it. I just wanted to own an extra special camera so I researched for something on the prosumer level.

The D90 just had so much going on with its sleek body. I got the kit lens, the 18-105mm which is really great for starting enthusiasts. You can play with a lot of camera settings. When I got it I was so naive that I didn't know how to use it, let alone read the manual, which most of us hate. The approach I did, as usual, was to play with it and shoot tons of pictures -- trigger happy you might say without any regard to shutter life. Most of the time I had it on AUTO and my favorite NO FLASH setting. I didn't even care about the other stuff on the knobs and its other features.

As I got to know the camera more after a few months, I got curious with the settings and theory behind stuff. The technical aspects first before going into composition and other artistic stuff. One great advice that I could provide is to study the relationship between three camera jargon: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. A good combination of these three will produce a good balance of light and dark areas on your pictures, which is commonly known as "exposure".

Currently I am still trying to learn as much from this amazing camera. It's almost a year now but learning never stops. I would suggest not to get the higher end cameras as your first SLR, but purchase something like the D90 or D7000 and get to know how the DSLR cameras work. When you feel you've leveled up and the camera's abilities limit the beauty of your pictures, that is the time to upgrade (the next upgrade would be FX or full frame sensors cameras).

I currently own three lenses. The kit lens 18-105mm, a 50mm F1.8, and 24-70mm F2.8 all of which are Nikkors (Nikon lenses).

Attached is an unedited picture I shot using this camera with the kit lens 18-105mm.

For the picture below, post processing techniques like HDR was applied to add features on both light and dark areas.

There's just so many things you could do and enjoy with this camera.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Earn money from your uploads?

I've stumbled upon this site last week, it's fairly new, though I'm not sure about other websites offering the same service. The website is Filesonic. It says you could earn money when people download your uploaded stuff! Yes it doesn't seem true but I'd be testing it. I actually bought a premium plan worth $25 from them, good for 90 days just to try it out.

Depending on the location where the file is downloaded, the pay-per-download rates differ so it's good to target countries like the United States, United Kingdom, and the latest addition - Germany. It pays a certain amount of $ per 1000 downloads of your file, ranging from $1 to $35 per 1000 downloads -- also affected by the file size. So the bigger the file downloaded, the bigger compensation you would get.

You can check out this link and find out for yourself. I will be updating this blog post to check how feasible this idea is. The main goal is to have files that people would like to download for free (of course they should be original material). I've uploaded one of my original compositions there for free download.

Click here to go to Filesonic.

Morning Sun (an original composition)

Here's one of my original works using the Yamaha PSR-K1. This was an older model of Yamaha that I bought at NY for a very cheap price of $270! What a great bargain for such a good investment. I did this music for an aunt of mine who just started her watercolor business at mygenuinedesigns.com (please check out this site for watercolor posters, they have all original work).

Although the video does not show my keyboard (as it does show our little piano). The PSR-K1 was what I used mostly during the creation of this composition. The latter parts, I used our piano.

The music has this serene and relaxing feel to it, as what my aunt wanted for her website since most of her pictures have lovely colors and warmth on them.

I have posted the notes to this composition here at these links. Feel free to use them but of course give credit to where it is due, as I still hold the copyrights to this piece. :) A link to this blogsite would be great!

If you're a fan of new sheet music, click here.

I'm Yours by Jason Mraz on the Piano

One of the first songs I've transcribed for the piano (of course it still best with the ukulele!). This sheet music is free for you to enjoy! Just take some time to download from the links below, all seven pages are available. These are all our personal transcriptions. We hope you like it!

If you guys want to learn new music sheets click Here.

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