Me and the Piano

Me and the Piano

Music like many things is best learned young—like age 4. Age 4 is perfect. I was 78. I had fooled with it briefly many years previous when a  friend of my wife was moving and needed a place to store her piano and we had a 7 room apt and offered to accommodate her. I got interested and  began to mess with it in  a none too serious way but it was fun and when, a year or so later,  the friend moved again and asked for the return of the piano it was annoying.

Now I was retired with nothing but time on my hands and what better way to kill it. So I picked up a used Casio 61 key on eBay for $70 just to get my feet wet and see what would happen next that was bound to be more interesting than sitting there falling into a TV coma.

I taught ESL for many years—English as a Second Language. My students were Hispanic and Korean. My first words to them were: You learn a language the way you learn to play a musical instrument. The process is exactly the same. The fingers are  muscles and the tongue is also a muscle. The pianist trains his fingers to play the notes and the tongue is trained to produce the sounds of a language. What it all boils down to is the amount of time you are willing to devote to this project—also known as practice. Now I was the student obliged to pay attention to my own words of wisdom. I decided one hour a day was too little and 5 hours was too much and settled on 3. Also  it was important to do it every day—7 days a week including Thanksgiving and Christmas. 

The first question I am asked is always the same: are you taking lessons? And my answer is: No—I have YouTube. Whatever it is you are trying to do you have at your disposal only God knows how many musicians out there with a YouTube channel and very happy to share their phenomenal expertise gratis. Also you have the software—Synthesia—that eliminates the  inconvenience of learning to read  music. Here is the keyboard and now the notes cascading down to light up the keys for you to play at various speeds according to your level

Musically my tastes are eclectic. I can think of maybe two musical styles that turn my ears to stone:  Hawaiian and Mariachi. George Orwell said the secret to torture was to discover the one thing the person was unable to tolerate. With Orwell it was rats. With me it is Mariachi. Lock me in a room and crank up the Mariachi and I would turn in my grandmother. 

Otherwise I am a relic of the sixties: Dylan, The Stones, Credence, etc. The first tune I learned was Fortunate Son with 4 chords: C, D, F, G. It took me an hour to learn the chords and six months to call it music. 

Now its 2 1/2 years later, the used Casio 61 key has been replaced by a Roland 88 with the graded hammer action—very cool—and my friend Andrew who plays guitar comes by every Sunday and we jam for 2 hours. He’s a metal head and so am I and we work over  the charts, to bang on Jump, or Dirty White Boy or Sweet Child of Mine, etc. His first words to me were: not bad. Then he said: you’re a little ahead of the beat.