I’m trying to teach myself piano about 30 years after abandoning my childhood lessons. You can find the roundup with links to what is and isn’t working so far here: Learning Piano in Middle Age: Roundup
Intro
For many years I’ve had an on-and-off fixation with the idea of a death clock, a modern memento mori that reminds you to focus on the important things by counting down the days until your actuarially-predicted death. A few weeks ago I installed one on my Watch and forgot about it. A few days later, I randomly looked down, saw that the current number was a bit over 17,000 days, and found myself thinking:
Hmm, if it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something, and I could spare at most 1 hour a day to practice, that means that I have one more thing that I can get good at.
I started wondering what that thing would be, and I started thinking about music. I’ve always been able to lose entire afternoons to actively listening to albums or clicking around sampling new artists. And music can create wonderful bonding moments, as I’ve experienced at concerts, social dances, and impromptu sing-alongs around a piano.
OK, so which instrument? My favorite instrument of all time is probably the vibraphone, but they’re bulkier than my minimalist tendencies allow, and not very versatile. The instruments you’re most likely to encounter in life are guitars and pianos/keyboards. With electronic versions, you can practice both of them quietly, and there are even ultra-minimal guitars like this Traveler Ultra-Light that wouldn’t take much room to store or carry.
The thing that tipped it to piano is that I really like electronic music, and knowing how to play keyboard is really handy for synthesizer work.
Kid in a…
With my mind made up on keyboards, I figured I’d get something small that I could hook up to a computer or iPad. I started by poring through gear guides like these from The Wire Realm and Gearank. I figured 61 keys (5 octaves) would give me enough range to practice a variety of pieces without being too monstrous, and that I wanted full-size keys to develop better habits on, no matter how cool the bluetooth Korg microKEY Air seemed. Keys that were weighted like a piano would be nice, but that would mean dropping a lot of money on something I wasn’t sure I was going to like. So in the end, I went with the Nektar Impact GX61, because it was sleek enough to not use up too much space or money.
Next, which piano tutor software? There seem to be zillions out there, some with very impressive SEO networks of related sites and “honest” video reviews. /r/piano was a good resource, and though every post on the topic always has plenty of people saying there’s no substitute for a human teacher, Piano Marvel and Playground Sessions came up as two that people thought reasonably well of.
First Day
I got the keyboard on a Friday, and so I spent the first few hours downloading a zillion apps onto my old iPad 3—I had the Camera Connection Kit which gives it a USB port that you can plug keyboards into, and I thought that would be a nice way to do things. But my iPad’s so old that it had stability problems, I mean both in terms of the apps not crashing, and the stand not falling backwards onto my desk. So I went with my MacBook Pro, which turned out to have other advantages later.
(More about setup, first lessons, and some struggles to avoid sliding into music gear and software lust to be added here later.)
First Attempts at Real Songs
Around Wednesday, I remembered that Playground Sessions gives you a free song download (usually $4 for members or $5 for non-members), so decided to give La Valse d’Amélie a shot before my free trial week was up. PS actually sells several different transcriptions of each song with increasing challenge level, and you have to pay separately for each one. You also get the ability to print out the sheet music transcription up to 3 times (or, you know, to a PDF).
PS breaks down each piece so that first you do the first several measures for the right hand, then the left hand, then both together. The first night of this, it took me almost an hour of banging my head against the very first section to get through it, but it was incredibly rewarding to have the melody take shape beneath my fingers. By comparison, the first few measures of the left hand part weren’t too bad, and then PS wanted me to put them together. Well, I’m still kind of stuck there—I’ve managed to hold it together for a few measures before one hand or the other goes wandering off, but it’s a messy taste of what things might be like after I get better.
I also hunted down sheet music to a couple nice piano transcriptions of songs that I love, Maxence Cyrin’s covers of Goldfrapp’s Lovely Head, and Pixies’ Where is My Mind (the one that they used on Mr. Robot). There are sites that sell legitimately licensed sheet music scores, though they often haven’t had what I was looking for. And then there’s, well, Google, and MuseScore.
I haven’t gotten that far into Lovely Head yet, though I did get far enough to puzzle out why there were all these sharp symbols hanging out on the treble clef, and how that acted as a modifier for all those notes, and how you then have to un-sharp them with naturals (cue Mr. B Natural). So I can kind of play the first few bars of the right hand.
Random Thoughts for the Week
- It took me a long time to write this up, and maybe I should just put that time into practicing more! Still, future weeks will probably have less to talk about.
- Somehow I thought that it might be like typing text on a computer keyboard, with one basic finger position that you need to know. But from my studies so far it seems like each piece might have its own fingering, and in many cases you might change your fingering at different points in the song!
- Can really good piano players just sit down and play a piece of sheet music cold, or do they pretty much always have to work out the fingering and how the parts fit together?
Next time: my uncertain relationship with patronizing Australian “AI” Musiah in Week 2.
