Tuesday 1 January 2019

Trying to Learn Piano: 2

Piano players are impossibly talented? How do you ever develop that amount of skill without performance enhancing drugs. All I have is strong coffee and domesdos.
 So here I am, week four of my journey into learning piano. To be honest, I don't remember guitar being this difficult to get to grips with. A quick chat with my sister disabuses me of this notion however. I apparently sucked for (in her words) 'a really really long time'.
This week I started to try and learn to read music. This has been something I have managed to avoid for over twenty years on guitar. For the 'non musicians' among you; it is not necessary to read sheet music in order to play an instrument. A lot of musicians learn to play by ear or from 'YouTube ' lessons or from tab. Which is to 'sheet music' what shandy is to whisky. A sort of 'paint by numbers' for your fingers.
No. I have been putting off learning to read because I am a bit dyslexic. My experience of taught sessions is one of abject fear, as information swells over me like a tidal wave. Consequently I completely loose my sense of what is being taught and quickly forget even the stuff that I thought I knew. The idea of booking a 'one to one' teacher was quite daunting & I needed someone I didn't know so that there would be no relationship implications if I had to sack them.
Eventually I find a nice lady in Harlow but the stupid website that I used wants more than ten quid before it will pony up her phone number. Now I'm all for free enterprise but this is just too much money. I'm already down £70 wing wangs for my crappy Aldi keyboard. In the end I circumvent the website and find her details on the interwebs. We are in business. Lesson booked, anxiety building!
I start to glean some information from the net in preparation for the lesson. Apparently there are two clefs (bass and treble) and these can have dots on the same lines but the dots will be different notes depending on the clef (kind of like windy can mean blustery or meandering depending on the context of the sentence). So simple pimple! We are off to a good start. Unfortunately the only acronyms that I can remember for the notes are all too rude to publish here. Suffice to say that by the time I had converted the acronym to the note and found its corresponding twin on my plastic piece of crap keyboard; small nations had been birthed and developed into mighty superpowers.
We need to rethink this technique people.

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