Getting Specific

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It's ridiculous to think I might have bought an $800 digital piano a couple of years ago just to use the drum machine that came with it. Its not true, of course, I bought it because it had 88 weighted and balanced keys like classical grand pianos do. Maybe a little of both. I wanted a digital piano with 88 keys and a drum machine. The fact that it came with 100 + other synthesized instrument patches is nice for varieties sake. It came in handy to play the drum machine in order to drown out the ambient sounds in the neighborhood that seem to be getting on my nerves today.

Percussion is the one area in music I never spend much time at. Playing the guitar had a percussion aspect to it in the sense that I kept time with it to sing. A few years ago I bought a djembe drum and played it for a while. I was getting fairly comfortable with several rudimentary rhythms when I started having trouble with the arthritis. I played a little recently because the prednisone steroids I was taking had my hands feeling okay.

The fact is that I never had no instruction in percussion. I didn't know how to practice to get better. I didn't know the rudiments. If I have learned anything else about life it's that to get what I wanted out of some endeavor, I had to know what the rules were so that I could break them.

I'm currently learning a song written by Jay Ungar called Ashokan Farewell. It's a song a lot of people heard because it was theme song for a popular TV documentary about the Civil War. Like others I thought the song was written during the Civil War, but it was written in 1982. The way people heard it played on TV created the rules for how they will accept it being played forever.

That's what I'm trying to do right now. I'm learning to play the song on my digital piano in the very same mode that made it popular with so many people. If I ever get that done I can start taking liberties and jazz it up a little bit to make it my own, but first I gotta acknowledge in public that originally it was somebody else's.

I can already play the song the way Jay Ungar wrote and performed it. But only one note at a time on the piano. I'm using a YouTube video of a violinist playing it because he does it right. He's accompanied by a guitar player. They keep it simple. I can play along with the video and not make too many mistakes.

Yesterday I found a Youtube video with somebody playing the song on the piano. By watching this guy play Ashokan Farewell I got some good ideas about how to accompany the single note melody I already play with my right hand. It's pretty simple in concept. He plays chords from bottom to top one note at a time at the same time he plays the melody. I should be able to teach myself to do that in about ten years.

The fact that I'll never be asked to play the piano in Carnegie Hall is one I accepted in childhood. I didn't have any ambitions other than to learn to play the scales when I bought this piano. I probably won't do anything with it other than to keep a promise to myself.

In the past, whenever I felt like I needed to have more of a technical background to grow in playing music I would use my not knowing how to play the major and minor scales as my excuse for not progressing. I didn't know exactly why I thought that.

Now that I've taught myself to play the scales from looking up how to do it on the internet I do understand why I thought playing the scales would help me perform better. Playing the scales teaches me about the piano as an instrument. Why am I always the last to know?

If I had learned how to play the scales on the guitar or any other instrument I fooled around with, it would have enabled me to be a much better musician and instrumentalist. That's what I needed to learn to play the scales for. To learn as much as I could about each instrument.

I didn't own a classical flute until I was at least fifty years old. I bought the first one I owned at a pawn shop even though I'd never played one before. I'd owned a few wooden recorders over time, and taught myself to play folk melodies and some nursery rhyme songs. I thought I might like to have a more precise instrument that I blew across the mouthpiece rather than into it.

That's the instrument I should have taken some lessons for. If I had done nothing more than learn to play the scales until I could comfortably play in any key upon demand I think I could have made a living as a musician. The flute I bought at the pawn shop died. I don't have a flute any more. That's kind of sad, but I doubt I'll ever own another one.
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