Posts tagged piano

I feel like I’ve graduated to a new level recently. I figured out a couple of the major scales on my own! It’s great how when you’re learning something new you go from feeling like a bewildered fawn in the forest to having a bit of confidence that you’re things are actually starting to make sense.

I’ve been getting pretty proficient at a lot of my majors, so every few days I pester Sara to teach me something new to practice. She’s been busy designing up a storm for her portfolio lately, so I don’t try to interrupt her too much while she’s in The Zone™. One of the nice, approachable things about learning the piano is that the keys are pretty logical. They go in a rather unsurprisingly alphabetic order C-D-E-F-G-A-B, C-D-E-F… so it’s easy to find which key I have to start on to begin a scale.

While waiting for her to teach me one of the keys I didn’t yet know, I said screw it let me try to figure it out. I started cautiously, but carefully, playing notes with the known starting key one by one. Nope, that didn’t sound right. Scratch that. Start again. Repeat. Eventually I’d stumble on a continuous set that sounded more appropriate. It wasn’t long before I had both B and E figured out without any help other than a confirming nod from Sara.

Next up, figure out how to do all these two handed. See you in a couple weeks!

As of late, I’ve finally started pursuing a hobby I’ve been meaning to start for quite some time — learning the piano. My girlfriend Sara and I have a rather interesting exchange of hobbies. She’s been wanting to go from just designing and writing websites to building some more interactive things with JavaScript and I’ve long been wanting to learn a musical instrument so we decided to exchange talents.

The piano’s always particularly stuck out to me, likely due to my fascination with keyboards of the qwerty variety. She’s been teaching me on her Roland HP 137. It’s a gorgeous, wooden studio piano her parents gave her when she was 16.

Thus far I’ve been learning a few majors in scales — C, D, F, and G. I’ve gotten somewhat decent at two handed C, but not quite good enough to do it over and over without fail. I’m not quite sure what path she’s going to take me down next but I know for now I want to start getting proficient at playing each of these scales two handed, and then on to the rest of the majors and minors I haven’t yet learned.

I’ll be posting updates from time to time on my progress, and just thoughts on learning music in the first place. Should be the start of a great skill in life I’ve always wanted! I can’t wait until the day I can sit down and just play a song as easy as riding a bike.