piano

A cou­ple of months ago I began play­ing with our new dig­i­tal* piano.  What a love­ly thing a key­board instru­ment is!  You just push a but­ton, and out comes a per­fect note— hard if you hit it hard, soft if you hit it soft­ly, and nev­er out of tune.  The but­tons feel great and they’re laid out in a neat row.  The tonal range yawns across many octaves.  You’re lim­it­ed only by the physics of your hands.  It feels like cheat­ing com­pared to every oth­er instru­ment I’ve ever played.  No won­der music began real­ly tak­ing off when this tech­nol­o­gy was intro­duced.

(*Why dig­i­tal?  Because it has head­phones.)

Not that I can be said to actu­al­ly play the piano.  Over the past cou­ple of months I’ve “learned” it in much the same hap­haz­ard way I learned to type thir­ty years ago— with­out any dis­ci­pline or tech­nique what­so­ev­er, dri­ven pure­ly by the urgent desire to trans­duce.  (Now that I think of it, most of what I know is char­ac­ter­ized by this rather slop­py approach.)  I’m sure I could achieve bet­ter results by study­ing it prop­er­ly with a teacher, and I’m still painful­ly slow at read­ing from the staff.  But: I began mak­ing music any­way, with the piano, a hand­held recorder, and some nota­tion soft­ware.  There have been some late nights.

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