I Got A Piano
So I have a piano. At no point on this blog have I ever said so, but I do. I got it last November. November 15th, I think, if I remember off the top of my head without looking? It's a fifty+ year old Baldwin upright piano, which I selected on the basis of being a free piano somebody paid to have moved out of their house into mine. So it was a very specific set of criterion I was looking for you see. But yes, I do have a piano.
I play the piano sometimes. Lots of the time actually. I got it because I wanted to get better at playing it, ya know? I've had some sort of keyboard available to me for most of my life, from little toy keyboards to bigger beginner keyboards to even bigger, still beginner keyboards. But they all had one thing in common, they were all for beginners. That's definitely still me, but I wanted something that would give me room to grow. Before I got this piano I was playing around on a Yamaha YPG235; a fine beginner keyboard if you're a young gun just looking to get your hands on some keys. But it wasn't exactly an instrument that transported me into a magical, musical stage of creativity and performance. The keys were not weighted and the spacing was off and there were only 76 of them and the sounds were so elementary... And thus, I got a piano.
It was surprisingly easy. You see, there are a wealth of free pianos available to the general public. These are usually from people who got a piano back in the day because it was just the piece of furniture you had to have. And maybe you thought, "Well, if I get this, I'll totally take lessons and get real good on it. I know I can take the time to practice on it and become a piano player." So, you got your piano, which cost thousands of dollars, and maybe you played it for a while there at first. Maybe you even had a piano teacher that came to your house, who leaned uncomfortably over your shoulder into your personal space, who breathed bad breath over you as they inspected your hands while you played the first songs in your piano songbook, the ones about buns and ducklings and mice and twinkling stars.
But, maybe you, after some time, became more and more discouraged as the piano you needed so much before becomes a burden to you, as you drag yourself to its hard, wooden bench if you can be bothered to practice something you're not entirely enthusiastic about any longer. Then, maybe you, after yet more time, abandon even that, and your prised possession of a piano becomes nothing more than a table, something for you to place decorations on and which inevitably takes up a large amount of space in one room or other in your house. Perhaps, after years of it being an inconvenience, moving it from house to house, squeezing between it and the coutch on your way to bed every night, dusting it during spring cleaning and placing gords on it come fall, you finally make the decision. "I want to get rid of this thing."
And so, you join the thousands of other Americans who have put out the word, who have told everybody, who have made posts on facebook marketplace and craigslist and anywhere one can generally advertise, that they would like to give their piano away. That they don't want anything for it except for somebody to get it out of their house.
Maybe even, after months of not being contacted by anyone, you resolve that you'd actually, on top of the money you paid for the darn thing in the first place, happily pay even more to have it moved somewhere else if only somebody who wanted it could be found.
And, I happened to be that somebody. And this is how I got a piano. For free. No payment of any kind. The person who gave it to me paid a piano moving company to bring it right in my house for me. I think it was more that she was just being nice than that she actually wanted to get rid of it so badly she paid to get that to happen, but either way it was a blessing. And so, I got a piano.
Since I got a piano, I'm trying to teach myself how to play the piano. I have a musical background and was well versed in it so I thought I could do this if I kept at it long enough. I don't know how truly long that will be, but I'm also not sure I realized, or still realize, what I'm even doing. See there are two primary ways you can play the piano. The first way, which I'm not sure how to do, involves using all ten of your fingers, sometimes all at the same time, to play lots of notes in intricate patterns and sequences. This is the method people normally adopt if they've ever been tought how to do it. The other way, which I do, involves playing entirely by ear and using whichever finger seems to be appropriate to hit whichever notes sound like they belong in the arrangement. This works OK, and for casual playing where it's not a big deal to hit wrong notes and have to stop, pick up your hands and play the phrase over, I'm pretty much as far as I need to be.
But I want to play in more formal settings. Ideally in church. I've always thought that would be cool. I maybe wouldn't want to be the main piano man but ya know, just have the ability to fill in for that person if need be.
But I'm not "solid" enough yet. I can't play reasonably well enough to keep up with other musicians or even people who are trying to sing along. Because my style of piano playing is like the hunt and peck method of typing on a computer keyboard. Jab your finger at generally the right area and hope for the best. And that is not really very effective. So I've instead been trying to learn how to use all of my fingers in common chord shapes in order to play, which works a lot better. Because, when I play a song I'm generally playing the whole song, and what I mean by that is all the parts. The rhythm, the bass, the chords, and the melody. And if my hand is already in the chord shape I need, then the melody notes seem to fall right under my fingers where they make logical sense. I'm trying to build lots of muscle memory so that when I need to play a specific voicing or I want a specific sound, I can just play it. I'm trying to get better at this. And so, I got a piano.
Recently, I've been getting back into playing the piano. It's really hard for me to commit to any one instrument for long enough to really build on my momentum with it. I'll get going along pretty good with something and then hear a song, or watch a video, or get inspired to pick up something else. Then I'll play that for a while, like maybe guitar or drums for example. Then I'll get going pretty good, and get caught up by something else. Sometimes it seems like I have a different favorite instrument every week. And that's why I have almost all of the most common ones, because when I get really into the sound of something, it makes me want to figure out how to make that sound myself. So now that I have all of the instruments I'm interested in, I can just go down in the basement to my music room and get right on any one of them.
I have always loved the sound of a steel guitar. Oh it's so pretty. There are so many cool things you can do with one of those. I always wanted one, and two years ago I finally bought it. Man it is so much fun to play. And I love the sound of a fiddle. I always have wanted to be able to play one myself, and so finally I got one of those too, and still get excited about playing it even though it's so incredibly different to everything else I've ever tried to play. And I really dig the fast, percussive, melodic sound of a banjo, and I have always really liked bluegrass music. So I borrowed a banjo from some friends of mine and played it long enough to know I was gonna need to go ahead and buy my own. But, now, I was raised on old gospel hymns, and I just really feel like they're so powerful both musically and lyrically. I grew up in a small church where all we needed for worship was a piano and an organ. I always did like to play the old hymns for myself and others. And so I got a piano.
Again though, I've recently been getting back into trying to play seriously and actively get better, ya know, instead of just playing for fun. The other day, I was out at a bible study I regularly attend, at a little community church. I was sitting there before it started, just fooling around on their keyboard playing a bunch of stuff, just whatever came to me. Nothing coherent or cohesive. Then, somebody came up and asked me if I could play: "Here Comes the Bride". The old wedding song. I could not, and bearly know how it goes. Like I knew maybe the first two bars? But they were telling me there would be a wedding coming up, and the guy they thought they'd have play it, a close friend of mine, hadn't yet commited to doing the gig. So I told them if they wanted me to do it, I'd go learn the song. The wedding isn't until September, so I have some time.
So I went home that night and looked up the song. There sure was a lot more to it than I originally thought. I imagined it would be sort of a simple ballad type thing, but actually parts of it were quite involved. I think "Here Comes the Bride" was originally written for organ, but I found a piano adaptation and started listening to it over and over till I got most of the arrangement in my head. Then I tried playing it, and quickly figured out my hunt and peck style pianoing wasn't going to cut it here.
Now I've been sitting down there, working on learning all the best ways to get my hands in the right shapes and the right positions to hit all the notes in a passable sequence. It's pretty challenging. I sort of have to unlearn the way that I've been playing to use this new more effective style, which I should have started with and I should have taken lessons to get at least the basics down but ahh well. I don't know that I'll be able to get this style good enough to play it exactly as written, may have to cut some corners on some of the chord voicings and leave out a third or fifth here and there. But I think I will be able to learn the song well enough to play it without messing up. It's going to take a lot of practice, but it'll be very helpful for me going forward to start thinking about playing like this. It'll only make me better. And that's why I got a piano.
So, yes. I do indeed have a piano that I play which I'm trying to play better so that I can play the piano better. But eventually I'd like to get a better keyboard, so that then I can record my piano playing into my computer and play some rudimentary parts for songs I've wanted to make. I have so many ideas on stuff I want to do, and I can't play any of them, and I feel too awkward asking any of the piano players I know to help out. Even though I know a guy, he's the main piano man at our church, and he's really dang good. We have fun jamming all the time and I'm sure he would probably be glad to help. But since I don't want to ask, the obvious next best solution is to just learn how to actually play the piano for myself.
I spent a lot of time last weekend researching keyboards. I've always really favored the sound of a Yamaha, in fact that's what we have at church and it's a glorious sounding instrument. It just plays like butter, so nice and easy, and it has a gorgious tone that just sorta wraps around me and seems to elavate my playing. Seems like I play better when the instrument I'm playing sounds better. Anyway though, so I've been considering picking up a used yamaha keyboard as an upgrade, like the P125 or 225. They have a full 88 key keyboard with weighted keys and I like the piano tones I've heard in reviews of these boards. I need to try to get out to Guitar Center or somewhere to try playing one before I buy it, but I really would like to upgrade to something like that. I'm also partial to some of the piano tones the Roland boards generate, so maybe I need to try out some of those too. Just the next step for me on my musical journey to... somewhere I guess. And so I'll get another piano.