Nightowl Well and nicely played. You are good in keeping the tempo steady. If you compare this to your videos from the past, there is a huge imrovement. In everything. Now you play with more self confidence, no more thinking pauses. You improved the hand posture, actually you are on a different level now. Keep going.
Cheap bench and self lowering?
Oh yes - same here. I bought my piano in a set: piano + bench + headphones. The additional cost compared to the single piano was about 50 to 60 €uros. The bench is one of those height adjustable models with a long turning screw with knobs for the rhomboid mechanism on both sides.
I, a male with heavy bones and beeing very 3-dimensional didn't trust the construction. I was right, because soon a leg came loose. Hardware store, 8 black mounting brackets + screws (two on each leg) and since then it is a stable. (+20 € andquite happy now) But the height adjusting mechanism isn't. Every month or so I adapt the height, because it lowers from alone. It's not a deal breaker, it something I can live with.
Still it is a cheap bench. Go to PW in the pianist forum and search for bench recommendations you are quickly in the 500$ dollar range. Cheap, as it happend that I found a screw underneath my bench. It loosesed from alone and fell out.
Is the bench creaking? Yes, absolutely. When I record myself, the audio goes directly into the desktop-computer, but my video camera picks up all the unwanted noises, including the creaking bench, key bounces and my breath. Good I play with headphones, so I don't hear that noise during my playing. And of course I mute the camera sound in my video edits - except for a few seconds when I want you to hear the page turning 😄.
Edit: While writing, my brain made an assumtion to modify the bench even further. It would lose the height adjutability, but the self lowering problem should be solved. And maybe the creaking reduced, too:
