Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum OT, Tell us about yourself

Hello. I've just registered and found a post leading here, so I suppose it would just be polite to introduce myself inasmuch as it is appropriate.

My taken name is Jonny Panic. I rarely use my given name outside of paperwork. I'm 36 years old, married to a most excellent woman, and I have Graves' Disease... which is nowhere near as bad as it sounds, but does mean I have tremors and have a hyperaware attention span and mild sensory hypersensitivity, so florescent lights and the like just kill me (figuratively speaking).

I used to be homeless or semi-homeless (since my teens), and during that time taught myself to sing using a trusty auto-reverse cassette Walkman, earbuds, an assortment of tapes ranging from INXS, U2 and Tears For Fears (whose B-side track Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams inspired me to this name long before I reassociated with computers. Yes, I know Sylvia Plath has a negligible publication of the same name, and no, I have no interest in it) to Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden, and long days spent drifting from state to state from 1993 till 1999, when I finally settled where I am now.

I live in northwest Indiana, just the other side of Gary from Chicago, and I'm a Fraud Analyst, which job bores me sometimes and make me long for the days when I used to unload trucks and build and repair grills, bicycles, furniture, exercise gear and similar for the likes of Sears, Wal-Mart or Lowes. Yes, I do know some people want to slap me for saying as much. I used to think I was into computers, but... well... I was when I was 16, and I'm not really now.

At this point, I've decided to take up digital piano because A) I've always wanted to play something, B) the DP is versatile and I have a hankerin' for not just piano sounds like the Pumpkins' "Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness" or Moby's "Rushing" but also the clav a la Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" and a couple other great sounds, and C) I've lost some fine motor control in my extremeties due to my change in profession two years ago and my Graves', and my doctor thinks this is a wonderful idea for rewiring said motor control.

That being said, I'm a complete newb currently in the market for a piano to begin with. I've lost interest in a couple of other time-consumptive hobbies and have plenty of time and energy to devote to this... which is good, because I love music more than just about anything, and would like to make more of it.

-Jonny Panic

Hi all, my name is Russell, I am almost 40 (arg) and have been learning piano since early this year. My family was always piano orientated, parents and four sisters all went quite high in their grades, but I was a bit of a handful as a kid so they decided not to put me through, probably a wise decision, I was an impatient kid, now I am just an impatient old man...lol

I have a wife and 3 kids and the younger two are learning piano, so I am learning with them, we all go to lessons on Saturday morning. They will most likely do prelim and grade 1 exams at the end of this year, I have just sat my grade two exam and am waiting for the results, the examiner didn't yell at me too much so that is a good sign !

I decided to learn properly as I really enjoy playing the piano and I want to be able to play some nice songs, mostly the usual stuff - Fur Elise, Clair de Lune, Humoreske, Minute Waltz... and so on in the classical side

I also like some of the more contemporary stuff, Yiruma, Jessicas theme from the Man from Snowy River, I love the cover of Metallica's nothing else matters by Scott Davis, that is also on the wish list.

Currently going through the first of the grade three pieces, one down two to go. My teachers plan for me is to get all the grade three work done and then move onto grade 4 hopefully well enough to do that exam next year and skip 3. Will all depend on work/practice/life in general of course but you gotta at least START with a plan

Cheers.

Russell.

Hey, Russell, welcome to PW! How nice it is for your family to all go to lessons on Saturday morning! Your kids must look up to you; you're even a grade ahead of them!

My name is Tsvetan,(...).

My name is Tsvetan, people call me Tsetso. I'm 22 years old from Sofia, Bulgaria. I started playing the piano a couple of months ago though I've liked piano and classical music all my life. I still remember the Stokowski records my father played for me. I've always expressed some aptitude for music but I never had the chance to own a piano and thus make the first step of playing. My mother died when I was about 11 years old and that left my whole family in ruins including me - clinical depression pretty much since then. I work a job that I hate. I have no friends and I dropped out of university. Grim story BUT remember I started playing the piano which is a tremendous step for me in my stupid little life. The reason I'm sharing this is that my involvement in music has given me a bit of confidence and therefor I think I owe it to myself.

That aside, I think that this is a really healthy forum. It's humane - quarrels about pieces, about practice methods, about lesson prices etc. Sometimes you can feel the warmth of people even through the digitized repesentation of the alphabet letters, sometimes you can feel the frustration and agony. Thank you for letting me be part of this community.