Piano

I'm learning to play the piano. It's quite an entertaining puzzle, in fact several puzzles at once: recognizing the note on the page, figuring out what key that is on the keyboard, learning hand positions, making my fingers do what that says, left and right hands doing different things, phew. It's like learning to drive all over again. Except this time I am not at risk of killing anyone; just driving them batty with 1000 repetitions of a three-note Mary Had A Little Lamb. Yes, I actually did that one night. Okay, I'm not sure exactly how many times, but I did it at least once for every setting on our digital piano, and there are a lot of settings... not only fifty different kinds of piano, but also sitars and ouds and steel drums and goofy sound effects and you name it. The kids thought it was great, especially the sound effects.

I would prefer not to spend much money on this project (for god's sake, we just bought a piano) so I am doing an introductory set of free online lessons. I am not really one to creatively noodle around, like Dale does; I prefer something structured. I seem to be one who wants to know I'm Doing It Properly. Also, I have no piano history at all (unlike Dale, who did take lessons for a while). My previous musical experience is mostly choir, which I liked a lot, and I did soak up some level of reading music there, but mostly rhythm and intervals rather than actual notes. Mostly I just memorized the song and used the music as a cue. I'm not counting the elementary school clarinet lessons with Mr. Gough. I don't remember those fondly.