The Brook - Hans Rucker II harpsichord

Thank you, Lanny. I enjoyed composing a piece specifically for the harpsichord, and Pianoteq's Hans Rucker II instrument sounds just wonderful to me. The piece is original, although I was influenced or inspired by an admiration for two harpsichord pieces by the French baroque composer Francois Couperin: his Les Baricades Misterieuses and Tic Toc Choc, especially the driving rhythmic elements of those pieces. The chord voicings and shifts one to another are characteristic of my own "harmonic palette."

I decided to restrict the composition to notes within the range of a modern acoustic harpsichord (notes F0 to F5), and I used Pianoteq's MIDI mapping to control the buff stop pedal (I mapped the sustain pedal to the buff stop pedal) and used two MIDI footswitches to change harpsichord manuals or registers (single and coupled) to keep my hands free as I played the piece. After practicing for awhile, I recorded it live in one take (no subsequent editing) into Pianoteq's MIDI recorder, then saved the MIDI file and exported a WAV audio file, both within Pianoteq, for use in the video. It was a lot of fun.