My First Piano

In this episode, My First Piano . . .

In the introduction, you heard my first piano lesson playing the melody Ode to Joy by Beethoven. Now, I'll admit I love challenging myself and learning new things. In January of this year (2023), I approached Lori and said, "This may sound a little crazy, but I want to learn to play the piano; what do you think?"

A little skeptical, her first comment was, "Where would we put a piano in our house?"

"I'm thinking of a digital keyboard."

"Well, you're not gonna move mine into your studio; if you're going  to learn to play the piano, we need to get you one for your office that will hook up to your recording equipment."

What a sensible, loving, and supportive wife.

So after a bit of research, going to a piano store, and trying out different pianos, I decided on a Casio CDP-S360, an electric keyboard. Why this one, you ask? Well, one of the things I discovered is it's better to learn on a full 88 keys piano or keyboard, and the second thing was that the Casio plays and sounds like a real piano.

Here's the advantage of a digital keyboard - it takes up much less space, and you never have to worry about tuning it. As a beginner, I didn't want to deal with all the different aspects of owning a real piano, including the price. If you bought or were offered a used piano, it may cost you more to refurbish and tune it than to purchase a new one, so I opted for a digital keyboard. This way, I was allowed to learn to play and not have to worry about all the added extras, so why a piano?

Well, one of the things I discovered playing guitar is I still haven't learned to read music. It's' much harder to learn on a guitar. However, on piano, I found that all the notes are symmetrically aligned on the keyboard in repeated patterns. It's much easier to learn to read music using the piano and then transpose it to the guitar, and the digital piano has so many more options in sounds that you can play with; here's an example of what I learned just a few weeks ago with Beethoven's Ode to Joy here's how I developed it, with no written musical score, using the sound of an organ.

Remember what you heard in the introduction? My beginner instruction book only had the first four bars of the Beethoven piece. But I had this sound in my head that I wanted to try and recreate. So, I taught myself the following, take a listen.

Ode to Joy audio rendition.

What you just heard evolved over a few weeks with experimentation and practice. Now I know the timing is wrong; I need more practice. My goal here is to document my ability on the piano and, in a few months, go back and see how I’ve improved.

My listening friends, you CAN teach an old dog new tricks! However, remember this, people are not dogs, and learning something new is not a bag of tricks. Just ask our eight-year-old who is learning to play the violin. I agree with her, learning to play an instrument - "It's fun!"

I'm Patrick Ball; thanks for listening; see you in the next episode.