Fabrizio Paterlini | The Long Path to Imperfection
Fabrizio Paterlini's "The Long Path to Imperfection" - how a daily Instagram experiment asking "how many emotions can you feel in one minute?" became an 18th-century villa recording session in 2019.
Story Behind “The Long Path to Imperfection”
The One-Minute Question
Summer 2019. Fabrizio Paterlini posed a question to his Instagram followers: “How many emotions can you feel in less than two minutes?” Nearly every day that summer, the Italian composer sat at his piano and shared one-minute pieces directly with his audience—“MicroStories” he called them. Raw, immediate, unpolished.
“The Long Path to Imperfection” came from this experiment. These weren’t carefully crafted studio tracks. They were moments captured on social media, testing whether 60 seconds could hold genuine complexity. By summer’s end, Paterlini had created 50 of these miniatures. Each one asked listeners to sit with a single emotional truth for just one minute.
Recording at Villa Dionisi
The MicroStories could have stayed digital. But in July 2019, Paterlini gathered these pieces and traveled to Villa Dionisi in Cerea, near Verona—an 18th-century Venetian villa with naturally reverberant halls. The villa’s high ceilings and open spaces created acoustics impossible to replicate in a studio.
He recorded live on a Yamaha C7 grand piano with felt strips inserted between the strings and hammers. This felting technique softened the sound, giving it an ethereal quality that matched the intimate nature of these micro-compositions. Carlo Cantini recorded, mixed, and mastered the sessions at Digitube Studio in Mantova.
The recordings became the Transitions trilogy: three EPs released between November 2019 and June 2020. “The Long Path to Imperfection” appeared on Transitions II, released March 27, 2020—just as the world entered lockdown, making these meditative miniatures feel eerily prescient.
“The Long Path to Imperfection” Recording and Production Details
Felted Piano and 18th-Century Acoustics
The technical approach was deceptively simple. Paterlini used a felted Yamaha C7 grand piano—a technique where felt strips are placed between the piano’s strings and hammers. This modification creates a softer, more intimate tone, stripping away the piano’s natural brightness to reveal something more vulnerable.
Villa Dionisi’s architecture became an invisible collaborator. Built in 1740, the villa features the characteristic high ceilings of Venetian noble residences. These spaces wrapped the piano sound in natural reverberation, creating depth without digital processing. The result sounds like you’re sitting in that hall with Paterlini, not listening to a recording.
The MicroStories Philosophy in Practice
Carlo Cantini recorded these sessions live, capturing both the notes and the inevitable imperfections—key noise, pedal movements, the subtle sounds of a human playing an instrument. These weren’t mistakes to be edited out. They were part of the point.
The track runs just 1:32—part of Paterlini’s experiment in emotional compression. How much feeling can you pack into 90 seconds? The answer: more than you’d think. The piece unfolds as a gentle meditation, each phrase breathing naturally without rush. It’s music that accepts its own limitations, even celebrates them.
Notes About “The Long Path to Imperfection” by Fabrizio Paterlini
Release Date: March 27, 2020 (Transitions II EP), August 28, 2020 (Transitions full album)
Duration: 1:32
Genre: Neo-Classical / Modern Classical / Ambient / Minimalist
Album: Transitions II (EP, track 5), Transitions (full album, track 13)
Recorded: July 2019, Villa Dionisi, Cerea, Verona
Producer/Composer: Fabrizio Paterlini
Recording/Mixing/Mastering: Carlo Cantini (Digitube Studio, Mantova)
Label: Fabrizio Paterlini Records / Memory Recordings
Part of: MicroStories project (50 one-minute piano pieces)
Fabrizio Paterlini “The Long Path to Imperfection” Era Details
Project Background
Project Name: MicroStories
Origin: Daily Instagram posts, summer 2019
Concept: “How many emotions can you feel in less than 2 minutes?”
Duration: Approximately 50 pieces created over summer 2019
Release Format: Three-part EP trilogy (Transitions I, II, III), later compiled as full album
Recording Location: Villa Dionisi (18th-century Venetian villa), Cerea, Verona
Recording Date: July 2019
Studio Work: Digitube Studio, Mantova
Personnel
Fabrizio Paterlini - Piano, composition
Carlo Cantini - Recording engineer, mixing, mastering
Instrument: Yamaha C7 grand piano (felted)
Transitions Trilogy Release Schedule
Transitions I - November 29, 2019 (8 tracks)
Transitions II - March 27, 2020 (8 tracks)
Transitions III - June 5, 2020 (8 tracks)
Transitions (complete album) - August 28, 2020 (24 tracks, p*dis label in Japan)
Production Notes
Felted piano technique: felt strips between strings and hammers for softer tone
Live recording approach capturing room acoustics of Villa Dionisi
Natural reverberation from 18th-century architecture with high ceilings
Minimal post-production to preserve intimate, imperfect quality
Each piece originally composed and shared daily on Instagram
Accompanied by short film documenting the Villa Dionisi recording session
Interesting Facts About “The Long Path to Imperfection”
The Title as Philosophy
The track’s title captures something essential about Paterlini’s entire artistic approach. Born in Mantua in 1973, he studied music theory at the Academy of Arts before spending the 1990s playing in rock, pop, and jazz bands. He didn’t focus exclusively on solo piano until the late 1990s, describing the piano as the instrument that “best expresses his inner world.”
That phrase—”the long path to imperfection”—works as both musical philosophy and life statement. Most classical pianists chase technical perfection. Paterlini went the opposite direction, using the felted piano specifically to soften edges, to embrace the human imperfections that make music feel alive rather than calculated. The MicroStories project took this further: one-minute pieces recorded quickly, shared immediately, preserving spontaneity over polish.
The Pandemic Album Nobody Expected
When Transitions II released on March 27, 2020, nobody—including Paterlini—could have predicted how perfectly these quiet, meditative miniatures would suit the moment. Within weeks, much of the world entered lockdown. Suddenly, millions of people found themselves with time to actually sit and listen to one-minute piano pieces about isolation, reflection, and accepting imperfection.
The full Transitions album arrived in August 2020, compiling all three EPs into a 24-track meditation on fleeting emotional moments. Reviews described it as “a gentle and delicate long walk into the different concepts behind the ‘isolation’ mind status”—words written before anyone fully understood how isolation would define 2020. Paterlini had accidentally created the lockdown soundtrack, built from pieces composed in summer 2019 freedom.
Common Questions
Q: What is “The Long Path to Imperfection” about? A: The title reflects Fabrizio Paterlini’s philosophy of embracing imperfection in music and life. The piece is part of his MicroStories project, where he explored how much emotion could be conveyed in brief, spontaneous piano compositions under two minutes. The “long path” suggests that accepting imperfection is a journey, not a destination.
Q: How long is “The Long Path to Imperfection”? A: The track runs 1:32, consistent with Paterlini’s MicroStories experiment of creating emotionally complete pieces within one to two minutes.
Q: What is the MicroStories project? A: MicroStories was Fabrizio Paterlini’s summer 2019 Instagram project where he composed and shared approximately 50 one-minute piano pieces daily, asking followers “How many emotions can you feel in less than 2 minutes?” These pieces were later recorded at Villa Dionisi and released as the Transitions trilogy.
Q: What does a felted piano sound like? A: A felted piano has felt strips placed between the strings and hammers, creating a softer, more muted tone. The technique removes the piano’s natural brightness, producing an intimate, ethereal quality that Paterlini used throughout the Transitions recordings.
Q: Where was “The Long Path to Imperfection” recorded? A: The track was recorded live at Villa Dionisi in Cerea, near Verona, Italy—an 18th-century Venetian villa whose high ceilings and architectural acoustics provided natural reverberation impossible to recreate digitally.