There is, of course, the Great Ongoing Guitar Thread. Me, I tried playing guitar for a bit and was rubbish at it. Then last May I bought a digital piano, signed up for lessons, and’ve been running with it ever since. Right now I’m working (primarily) on “The Ecstasy of Gold”, by Ennio Morricone, as arranged by some dude on youtube. It’s challenging, especially for a guy who’s been doing this for under a year. But I’m making steady progress–approaching the end of the first page now, yay! Also working on a little Bach piece that I forget the name of. I like to credit my success to years of typing. After all, what is piano but musical typing on a rather long keyboard?
My big challenges remain 1) reading music, particularly on the bass clef and 2) getting my hands to do fairly complicated things that are more or less independent of each other. And, as I’m starting to run into situations where I can’t just “walk” my way into a new position for the next stretch of notes, keeping track of where my hands are and getting them in the right spot at the right time is becoming a thing, though not much of one–just another piece of the puzzle.
And, for the mundane and pointless, we have the little tiny calluses that I have on on the sides of my thumbs. Never knew piano gave you calluses!
Anyone else tickle the ivories? I don’t know as this could sustain a lengthy thread, since pianos are just… y’know, pianos. And you generally have ONE, and there you go. But I’m enjoying this whole thing and rather want to talk about it!
Hello, fellow pianist checking in! I think there are a few of us on the board.
I’m currently working on improving some Yurima pieces - River Flows In You and It’s Your Day. These pieces suit me because I have small hands (I struggle to reach an octave).
I think your challenges are pretty typical of a beginner player and will improve over time. Does your teacher get you to do any piano exercises? After not playing regularly for years, I have found my technique has greatly improved by doing some Hanon exercises at the start of each session.
I’m primarily a guitarist (acoustic rock/pop/folk-pop), but I have keyboard (Studiologic SL-880 88-key weighted midi controller) and korg synth in my studio (driving an old Roland tabletop synth module for ease or a VSTi sampled Steinway when I fire up the studio PC). I haven’t played regularly for a few years, but I am still fairly handy. I do think entirely in chords, though, and need to work on my left hand for a bit more variety. I am certainly not a technical player. I’d like to learn to play boogie/blues, though.
I was learning a song by Glen Hansard (Bird of Sorrow) a few weeks ago, and decided to record the piano to round out the sound, and was fairly impressed with my work - it matched the quality of the rest of the work for a first practice cut…
I have an ongoing project to produce backing material for the songs I play (basic drum/bass structure of song with multiple scheduled software loopers to record and layer vocals/guitar/harmonica and a bit of keys). All very techie but really fun, and I’ll need to really work on the keys/synth bits to get them fitting in with the rest of the performance at the same level of skill (strictly in the middle of the performance spectrum). The project goal is solo (mostly) live performances that have a layered, structured sound (just the drums/bass/a bit of keys as pre-sequenced/recorded material). The first song I completed in this way had such a good final output I was really impressed, but I have a lot of additional work to do. But I do have quite a bit of free time to do this at the moment.
Dunno if a bit of a side track is allowed, but do your animals love the piano too? My dog loves nothing better than to sit by the piano and listen. If we go to friends’ houses she will sit by the piano and make puppy eyes until someone plays for her. If she hears distant thunder she will take you to the piano to play to her until she isn’t frightened anymore.
That’s the magic of pianos, I think. It’s so soothing, the sound is so clear and beautiful. That’s my theory for why she likes it, with her dog hearing. She doesn’t care about recorded music at all.
I am NOT a pianist. I am a guitarist. I’d say I’m maybe a step above mediocre – good enough to play in a band, good enough to improvise and write, but not good enough to make a living at it.
That said, the incredibly talented piano player we had in our band recently quit - for about the 50th time - but in the mean time, I stepped in as the de facto replacement keyboard player. Now, I’m obviously not contributing everything our ersatz band-mate was, but I’ve had a lot of fun transposing our songs from guitar to keys, and I think I’ve made great progress in my ability over the last month or two.
I’ve always wanted to be good at playing piano, but alas, I’m limited to playing the right chords at the right time, with my bass hand limited to root notes (and sometimes limited to just lying there looking cool), but hearing a song come off well with my little organ fills and piano tinkles is just so damn cool to me right now.
I’m afraid this doesn’t work with my cat. To her, the piano is this other animal in the house that distracts my attention from the most important thing: her. So she tends to raise a great ruckus any time I play the piano, so as to get my attention back where it belongs.
Well, I’ll call myself a pianist, although it’s the weakest of all my disciplines. I’m a singer first, a guitarist second and piano is a distant third.
I’m also on hiatus at the moment - I’ve really never figured out the ergonomics of doubling piano and guitar. I was low on time and high on stress in the period before Christmas, and so I called my teacher and said I wouldn’t be coming in for lessons until February. In the intervening time, I’ve been polishing guitar and voice music for recording sometime in May. Strangely, if I’m not practicing piano for an hour a day, I can play guitar for 3 - 4 hours with no noticeable wrist pain. If I do play piano and guitar for an hour each per day, my left wrist is inflamed and irritated. Well, obviously, there’s something about piano that I’m not doing right, but a) what is it? and b) is now really the time to be figuring that out? Stay tuned…
That being said, I love it and miss it terribly. Classical player - I was last working on Bach 2-Part Inventions and the slow movement of a Mozart sonata. I’m also working on my sight reading.
It’s funny - traveling around and trying to get your practice in anyway has led me to play a lot of different pianos, both acoustic and digital. One of my best gigs was when I sang in a production of ‘Man of La Mancha’ - that theatre was also the concert hall for the town, and they had a gorgeous Bösendorfer that lived in its climate controlled room during the run of the show. The whole cast was allowed to play it for an hour a day - it was bliss! What a fantastic instrument! It made up for all the times of playing on some poor, neglected upright or some wobbly digital that just wasn’t up to the task.
By the way, my dog loves to lie on the floor under the piano while I play. Here’s a photo of my dog Benji (the large brown Labradoodle) and a dog we were baby-sitting, Maya (the long-hair chihuahua) enjoying me playing one evening. Actually, I think I have it arranged so it’s in the same folder of photos as when the baby grand moved into the house…
My son just started lessons, does that count? He’s almost 6. He was thrilled to learn his first song, Merrily We Roll Along.
I had lessons years ago. I’m trying to start again so we can practise together. Mostly I’m just doing exercises (I’ll give those Hanon exercises a go), and gradually working through Bach’s Prelude #1 in C Major.
I wouldn’t have thought so, no. I’m the wrong person to ask, in that I have thick calluses (from playing classical guitar) on everything but my LH thumb. I haven’t noticed that piano has given me any extra calluses, nor a callous on my LH thumb.
It partly depends on what you do with your hands the rest of the time - a carpenter, amateur or pro, is going to have much rougher hands than someone who does nothing at all with his hands.
I would have thought, though, that a lot of computer typing would have given you as much or as little callous as a piano…
This is definitely piano related. This is on the outside edge, right next to my nail. It’s a very, very small little callus–sort of like a hangnail, I guess, but not. Seems to arise from striking the edge of the (white) keys with my thumb. If I don’t practice for a few days (or if I get the bright idea to start biting them) they go away and it hurts to practice for a bit.
Are your wrists above or below the keys? If your wrists are too low, you could be hitting the keys at too sharp an angle with your thumb.
I took piano lessons for many years as a kid, played at church, and can still sight read simpler songs. I was never a “musician” and didn’t have the ear to progress to elite level. I struggled memorizing and improvising anything that was not on the page.
Not a pianist myself, but have quite a few friends who double on keys and sometimes fill in doing chords when helping record a live date or a rehearsal (I’m that weird friend who sits behind the computer eating the “free” pizza and adjusting the microphones).
Sometimes I think about improving my technique on piano, such as it is, and a few years ago one of my bassist (my first instrument, bass guitar, which I don’t play anymore because I have a life LOL!) friends sent me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNehnI-2GsE.
Kind of a nice, easy way to learn some ideas, with all this YouTube. It’s always amazing to me how piano players kind of already know what a bassist is apt to play, ya know? I’m in awe of what real pianists can do as far as playing left hand and right hand together!
The other guy I like is Art Tatum – can anyone play like that on here?
I doubt it. He was one of the very best jazz pianists, and if you ever look at an Art Tatum piano score, you’ll see that jazz piano can be every bit as complex as classical, if not more. Piano greats like him can effortlessly improvise measures consisting of 64th notes.
Ha! Yeah me and a drummer friend kind of made fun of a mutual acoustic guitar slinger for not knowing about Art Tatum. God is in the house and all that.
Rhythm section can sometimes know about music, too, homes! I think we got to speaking about flat finger technique and how it was similar to getting the right drop on drum/bass without getting late on the “one.”
What was that musician joke that ends up with drummer calling “Stable Mates” at 300 bpm or something? Well, never mind – I’m on vacation actually right now from up out of the Bay Area via Corvallis and just getting kind of bored.
Good to see some musicians up in here – like I said I’m not playing anymore but just kind of filling in and manning the “desk” when needed.
Above–I can’t really imagine how they could get below!
Meanwhile, the Ecstasy of Gold is doing a number on my right hand. You’re pretty much constantly doing this repeated sixteenth-note pattern throughout the first page, with occasional breaks to play a different sixteenth-note pattern and a chord or two. I believe I will have a Popeye-style right forearm by the time this song is done!
I took classical piano lessons from the ages of 7-13. When I stopped taking lessons I was playing at an intermediate level, and that’s where I’ve remained. My technique has largely gone down the drain, but I can still play well enough to impress those who don’t know any better.
Like Le Ministre de l’au-delà, though, I’m a singer first – even though I started playing nine years before I had my first voice lesson. I’m a much better singer than I am a pianist, I continue to pursue professional vocal instruction to this day, and singing is what I’m compelled to do in front of other people. It’s also what I get paid to do, every now and then. I need to have a piano/keyboard in my home to stay sane, but it’s a personal thing: I don’t play publically (though I did a little in college, making a few bucks playing for wine-and-cheese gatherings).
I am currently working on incorporating my piano playing into my jazz singing (I started as a classical singer, then moved to Broadway, then sang rock/folk and originals for a while, and four years ago I realized that my heart is truly in jazz). This may sound weird, but for me playing the piano and singing are two completely different things: figuring out a way to combine them will help my jazz improvisation, and also feels like a “duh” thing to do.
No. I’ve been playing for 35 years and have never gotten calluses on any of my fingers. You should consult with a piano teacher – perhaps just for a lesson or two – and find out what you’re doing wrong. Whatever it is, fixing it might also make other aspects of your playing easier/better.
Recommendations for a digital piano?
I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting to play again (took lessons as a child). And I’d obviously need something to play on.
I’ve got a Casio CDP-120. It’s not bad as an entry-level, but I’m not sure if I’d recommend it. I’ve been doing this less than a year, and I’m already thinking about upgrading to something that sounds and feels a little bit better. What is your price range?
Misnomer, I’ll ask my teacher about it. He’s never said anything about it.
