I thought I would write a little on music in my life. I don't know if this is going to be interesting to anyone. If not, skip ahead.
I come from a fairly musically oriented family. My dad played the trumpet in his college marching band, my mother played the piano [mostly for family]. My sister makes a living with the violin. My brother likes the guitar, and hangs out with a local band.
Growing up, I had a lot of piano lessons. Classes from the local university, looking back on it, that were aimed at teaching college students how to teach the piano to kids [me]. I got pretty good at individual pieces, but always had trouble with improvising or working out of a fake book [melody in right hand, chords in left, you decide how fancy you want to make both].
Around 9th or 10th grade I went to a different teacher, to try to learn some more skills, but I wasn't practicing enough to learn much. And about that time my parents got me an electronic keyboard for Christmas. The intent was good, they hoped it would be a way for me to get more excited about playing and practicing. And it sort of worked, for a while. But: (1) there was other stuff I was much more interested in (2) my younger sister was better with the violin than I was with the piano, which was pretty discouraging (3) the keyboard itself was complicated enough that I couldn't use it to its full range, which didn't really help.
So, if I had been in a band, or working towards it, and was a little bit better, the keyboard would have been a great present. As it was, it didn't really do the job, and was probably way more expensive than the use I got out of it.
Now, I've still got the keyboard, and I still have the music, and I still have some of the old skill, so every now and then I think about restarting playing. Maybe I will. Someday.
Posted by Owlish at June 26, 2005 01:08 PM