One day I came home from work to find out that Angela had acquired a piano. I was a little surprised at first, because we already had an electronic synthesizer, but I was also excited because there is no substitute for a real instrument.

For some reason, from the moment I heard that we were going to get a piano, Bach's "Prelude in C Major" kept running through my head. Every time I would think about the piano, that old familiar melody would just pop into my head, and I knew that as soon as we got the piano installed and tuned up, that I would have to record myself playing that song.

I had about a month from when we agreed to take the piano to when it was going to be tuned and repaired, so I decided to challenge myself to memorize the song and get to a point where I could play it "well enough" to record a video of the new piano. The day after the piano tuner visited, Angela had to teach her class at the university, so I was home with Kai all afternoon. While Kai was having his nap, I took the opportunity to film this video.

Most of you probably saw this video already, but I like to use my Picture Of The Week as a record of interesting events in my life (plus I need some filler material for September), so please excuse the "old news" if you have.

Anyway, I had managed to memorize the song fairly well in the month that I had, but it still took me several tries to get a good take for the video. In fact, I think I had to try about a dozen times over the course of Kai's hour long nap. The best take (and the one I posted to YouTube) was actually the very last one, and the point at which the video stops is the exact point at which I ran out of space on my camera, so I was very lucky that it recorded the whole performance! (Also, Kai woke up about a minute after I stopped playing, so I was also lucky on that front too!)

So now we have a piano that the kids can play as they are growing up. We also still have the Roland, which has headphones and is thus possible to practice on when people are sleeping. The best of both worlds!

Technical Details: This photo is a still from a video taken with my 5D Mark II + Tamron 28-75 at 28mm, ISO 1600, f/3.5 for 1/30th of a second.