The latest obsession

A little while ago Elly gave me her Yamaha electric keyboard. She might as well have given me a mainline supply of crack cocaine. 

I have completely succumbed to the spell of the piano. It is all I want to do. For two days I just played scales and swam in the different feelings that different keys gave me. I figured out the C-F-G chord thing that can go along with a whole lot of melodies. I found about a gazillion variations within Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I started cruising YouTube for tutorials, and fell under the spell of Bach. For the last week I've been learning to decode musical notation with the help of the Prelude in C Major. 

The last two days I've had piano lessons from two different teachers. Both are treating me a bit like a prodigy, which is fun for the self esteem. I have no business playing as well as I am after two weeks. But when it becomes necessary to perch a clock near the thing so I don't forget what part of the day I'm in, progress is going to happen in short order to anyone. 

Today I found someone who I want to work with for awhile. He is of the firehose mode of information transfer, my favorite type. Right away he was challenging me to come up with minor diminished chords on command, and correcting my hand and seat position. I knew that I needed some outside influence before I acquired a host of unconscious bad habits, which may be one reason the fiddle never took. I learned the notes by mimicking my favorite fiddle recordings, with no attention to technique.  By the time I got some professional attention I had ways of holding the bow that I was never able to overcome, and I never mastered proper intonation. This was shortly before I met Robin, and she was not keen on sharing a house with a beginning, out of tune fiddler. I made my choice. 

This instrument I can plug headphones into if necessary, though I'm already starting to rearrange the living room in my mind to accommodate an upright. At today's lesson I couldn't believe the difference the weight of a real piano key made, and the subtlety it imparted. 

If only there wasn't this pesky business that I'm supposed to run. 

Comments

[Tommy Williams]

You can buy digital pianos with weighted keys--that goes a long way towards making an electronic device be a reasonable instrument.

But they're limited to (or at least they were the last time I bought a keyboard) 256 levels of pressure from softest to loudest. And even though I am far from an accomplished musician, I would often find myself running up against the coarseness of those steps.

I suppose it doesn't help that I grew up playing on a Steinway grand piano and have absurd expectations for the feel and sound of a piano-like instrument.