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Joined: Aug 2005
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Originally posted by seesusiplay: Was recently told by the music teacher at our school (WHO HAS NEVER HEARD ME PLAY) that the Hanon exercises were too advanced for me. Oh my gosh. I hope you punched him in the nose. What a ridiculous, condescending thing to say. I'm glad you didn't let it get to you.
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Joined: Feb 2007
Posts: 72
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Monica, I think about that man with a kind of evil glee every single time I sit down and bang out another Hannon bit. I haven't gotten them up to speed yet, but time will provide. --susi
-- that my story and I'm stickin' to it.
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Joined: Apr 2007
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Since I just joined this week-I'll add my story.
I'm 45, and started piano a couple of years ago. I had always wanted to learn, my father played before he got married but since my mother didn't like to hear any mistakes he pretty much stopped. Her attitude kept me from taking lessons because she didn't want to hear practicing scales or sloppy sounding music. If it wasn't perfect, don't bother. I was able to satisfy some of my love for music in chorus-HS, college and church choirs. When I was in my 30's, we got a new music minister at our church who was around my age and we got to be good friends. She also taught piano and one day when we were talking I told her my story. I had pretty much given up on the idea of learning piano because I was "too old". Well, she put that idea out of my head pretty fast and told me she would teach me whenever I was ready. She bought herself a BEAUTIFUL Steinway grand a few years back and whenever I would visit it felt like it was pulling me to play it. One night when I was visiting I mentioned the pull and she ripped off the cover and we sat down for my first lesson. WOW-I can't explain to you what it felt like to touch that beautiful instrument. It still brings tears to my eyes when I think about it. It took a while, but eventually I bought my first piano and got kind of serious-a Yamaha Clavinova. The digital was nice, but I really wanted the feel of an acoustic so last year I traded the Clavinova in on a Yamaha U1. I call myself a Beginner 3, because right now I'm in the Third book of John Thompson and Michael Aaron. My goal is to be able to sit down at the piano and play some light classical, some Broadway and Pop songs for pure pleasure.
I have a deep and satisfying relationship with my Yamaha U1...
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Joined: Aug 2005
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Fitswimmer, on some other thread you mentioned playing for your assorted furballs. Are they of the feline or canine variety?
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Joined: Apr 2007
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Originally posted by Monica Kern: Fitswimmer, on some other thread you mentioned playing for your assorted furballs. Are they of the feline or canine variety? Feline. I have 3, all adopted from the local shelter. One mostly Russian Blue, one tabby and one long hair.
I have a deep and satisfying relationship with my Yamaha U1...
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Joined: Feb 2007
Posts: 308
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My name is Nick and I am 57 years old. I recently retired from a career in teaching after 36 years i the classroom. I am currently working a few days a week as an adjunct professor for a local college. I have studied piano in my youth and was originally a music major in college. I decided to move into El.Ed. as getting a music teacher's job in 1972 was nearly impossible. I loved teaching however, decided it was time to move on to better things. I am returning to piano after many years of life in-between and loving it. As a retirement gift my partner of twenty-nine years, bought me a Vogel grand piano which I love as you can tell by my screen name. I originally had a Wurlitzer spinet and the grand was a dream come true. I am taking art classes in oils and watercolor. We have a home in New Hampshire as well as Marco Florida so we travel a lot. New York is home base and I am a true New Yorker. Love the theater and bustle of the city. Living on LI is great in the summer, fine beaches and easier lifesytle than Manhattan. Our dog Cleo is a black lab and fun to be with. Reading for pleasure takes up some of my time as well as the fourm! I have met wonderful people on the forum and have made contacts as far as Milan Italy. We travel often, mostly in the summer. Enjoy going to Europe and have been fortunate enough to visit many countries there, and our home in NY reflects our travels. Thanks to all of you on the ABF for making a part of my retirement an enjoyable, entertaining one.
Best Regards, Nick
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Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 796
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I've been away for a year or so (!), but thought I'd take a moment to reintroduce myself.
I'm a forty- (hm, had to pause and check) five year old mother of two and a self-employed publishing consultant who works and lives in a lovely town north of Boston. My ex-rocker husband is in the pet supply business, my 9 year old daughter is learning violin and piano and my 6 year old son just started piano lessons a few months ago. We all sing as well. We have a sweet muttley houndy kind of rescue dog who will soon be a year old, and more fish tanks than I can count.
For fun I play the piano, and spend a lot of time volunteering for the Girl Scouts. (My blood is turning green, I think.)
I studied piano for 7 or 8 years as a child. As an Army family, we moved every year, so I had 7 or 8 piano teachers. I never quit, I think we just forgot to get a new teacher the year I was a junior in high school.
I scratched my musical itches in college and post-college by singing classical and a cappella music.
Then for a long time, singing along to the radio or singing hymns at my Unitarian Universalist church was about as musical as I got.
About 10 years ago I inherited an 1864 Steinway square, (the first piano I learned on), but sadly, it isn't much of a piano these days. With the research help of the Piano World Piano Forum, I bought a used Charles Walter upright in 2005.
I became massively addicted to PianoWorld and to playing. I started taking jazz lessons from a very talented young performer (who is pretty successful on the local jazz scene). I discovered I'm not so much a "jazz guy," and after a year of beating my head against a brick wall I decided it felt better to stop! But it was definitely worth the try.
Because of my family, work, and volunteer obligations, I always felt guilty--when I was practicing (and lurking, and posting), and when I wasn't.
I've recently been playing (poorly, I'm afraid) Debussy, Chopin, Dario Marianelli's Pride & Prejudice score, and Joplin (go figure). It satisfies that little-used corner of my brain.
My parents, who were also both musical but not especially proficient on the piano, are gone now, and I find myself trying to polish pieces they half-knew.
I had the thrill of attending the M&H tour in 2005 and meeting some wonderful PW people, and I'm falling off the bench in my anticipation of the Steinway tour next month. Thanks for letting me pop back in.
If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.
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Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,608
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Hi Rustyfingers--We have been on similar piano paths. I also took jazz for awhile as an adult and found it definitely wasn't for me. I wish it were, but I am much more comfortable with classical piano. I do occasionally try out a less classical piece (my last two recital entries have been more modern/popular), but that's out of my comfort zone.
I'd love to try out the tours, but I'm a bit far from Massachusetts. I bet they're great fun.
Nancy
Estonia 168
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Joined: Dec 2006
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My name is Yuri, and am rapidly approaching 40...
I played piano for about 10 years as a child, and also a few years during my college years (almost every one of my university friends - all majoring in either mathematics or theoretical physics played piano, and we held regular informal recitals) in Kiev University (Ukraine). Moved to the US, made a career as an engineer, got bored, went to business school (Berkeley), and now have my own investment management company.
A piano (Roland digital, to facilitate frequent moves) was one of my first purchases in the US. Unfortunately, my piano playing came to abrupt stop when I badly injured my right hand. So, I have not played for about 12 years.
Now, I have a 5-year old daughter, and half a year ago she started taking on the piano lessons. Since I was helping her, my spouse told her "Did you know that your Daddy was a great (that's her overstatement, YD) piano player?". So she started to beg me to play for her. Now, I thought I would not be able to do that - my right hand, though they did a splendid job at Stanford on putting it together (4.5 hours surgery!), is only about 70% of what it used to be in the range of motion.
Finally, I succumbed to my daughter, and lo and behold, it wasn't that bad - it took me a few days of sneaking to the piano when nobody was in the house to play Maple Leaf Rag reasonably. So, I started playing, first a few minutes per day, but it progressed to the point of me actually finding a teacher for myself - so, starting from January 2007 I am actually taking lessons again...
That's my piano story...
Yuri
Yuri FWIW; YMMV
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Joined: Aug 2005
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Rustyfingers, welcome back! And, Yuri, welcome for the first time! Your comeback from injury is an inspiring story. It reminded me a lot of how mr_super-hunky came to the piano. See his "I clap for myself" thread for details.
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Originally posted by NancyM333: I also took jazz for awhile as an adult and found it definitely wasn't for me. -- I do occasionally try out a less classical piece (my last two recital entries have been more modern/popular), but that's out of my comfort zone. Nancy, I still play all kinds of music, but I need the sheet music. All I can do with a lead sheet is play simple chords or arpeggios. I think it boils down to being much too inhibited to improvise and knowing theory in my head, but not in my fingers. Originally posted by YD: Unfortunately, my piano playing came to abrupt stop when I badly injured my right hand. So, I have not played for about 12 years.
Now, I have a 5-year old daughter, --she started to beg me to play for her. -- Finally, I succumbed to my daughter, and lo and behold, it wasn't that bad Yuri, your story (and mr_super-hunky's, thanks for that, and the welcome, Monica), are inspiring and will teach me to stop my whinin'. I may be busy, but I can play if I want, and I see that I'm very lucky indeed. -RF
If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.
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Joined: Oct 2004
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I can't believe I've never posted to this thread,...... Here goes My name is Rodney Jones and I live in Caledon (Greater Toronto Area), Ontario Canada. I've lived in the GTA for most of my life, but I was born in St. John's Newfoundland. I'm 41 years old as of last week and have been married for 3 years (as of 2 days ago). I have a son (William) who just turned 4 months and a stepson from a previous relationship who is about to turn 17. Besides Piano/Keyboards and recently Guitar, my main extra curricular activity is weight lifting which I do almost every day (for the last 20+ years). I've been involved with software development for my entire adult life; as a programmer in the beginning but now managing development teams. (I guess this makes me a GEEK!!) Drums were my musical instrument of choice as a kid, and I enjoyed this into my early 20s. Unfortunately a lot of moving around and life changes made percussion an impractical choice as an adult. About 7 years ago, my stepson expressed an interest in Piano so I purchased a cheap Yamaha keyboard and signed him up for lessons. Within 2 weeks he was playing the first half of Fur Elise (memorized) and finished the second half (much harder part) in the following week. I immediately went out and purchased him a grand piano and he's never turned back. After many thousands of dollars in software, computers, instruments(synths and workstations), studio gear, etc; he now composes orchestral music for games, movies, plays and for his own enjoyment. Oh wait,.....this is supposed to be about me,.... sorry but I can't help but boast!!! When his mother and I parted ways 5 years ago, I decided to take up piano/keyboards so that he and I would always have something in common. Thus began my obsession. For the first year, I was self taught from books and made good progress but then I hired a teacher, who helped me make great strides in sight reading and general piano technique. Due to a job change, I could no longer take lessons with this person so I began a LONGGGGGG search for another teacher who could give me insights to playing the voodoo of POP, Blues, JAZZ, (ie. not classical). During my search, I returned to self study which started my obsession with music theory and methods. I believe I now own every book worth owning on the subjects (not many) and far too many music books that aren't worth the paper they're printed on. The sum total of what I've learned from these thousands of pages can be found in the "Chord Voicing (A Primer)" thread. I finally found a FANTASTIC teacher who was a Juno award winning composer, arranger, performer and teacher (in that order). He introduced me to playing from fake books/lead sheets so that I could play many styles of music beyond classical and arrange my own interpretations of these songs. Unfortunately, this teacher passed away suddenly from Cancer, so I'm back to self study. A little over a year ago, my wife decided that I needed something other than Piano and Exercise to keep me busy so I found an Electric Guitar and Amp under the Christmas tree. If you think practicing one instrument is tough, try two,.... Arggg! I now own four electric and one accoustic guitar(s) and just last week, my wife sugested I should pick up a drum kit and add percussion to my practice schedule. That's me in a nutshell, Rodney
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Joined: Aug 2005
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Thanks for filling us in, Rodney! I'm envious of your baby. As my pediatrician told me once, "a 4 month old is the happiest creature on the planet," and that was by far my favorite baby age. Old enough to sleep through the night, full of smiles and giggles, but not yet mobile. I was sorry to hear of your teacher's death. You were fortunate to have found somebody who was so compatible with your interests and needs.
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Lets see.... Just turned 38, I work in the IT field, and music / bicycling are my main hobbies. Oh, and fanatically watching hockey. *shameless plug on* Musically, I write / perform / mix just about all my own stuff.. I have a fairly good deal of work available for listening over at Soundclick, though the majority is incomplete due to lack of a vocalist. I have a song on a compiliation CD from another music forum, and another one coming out in a few months, both of which I am pretty happy with (now I just need to make my own!).. as I get more proficient in piano, it will become very much a center point of my work. *plug off* Lets see.. Been married and divorced, currently quite happy living 'in sin' as it were, and for the first time in decades, reasonably happy as a person
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Cute video (and puppy!), Mark. Looks like the two dogs loved each other at first sight. atropos, your shameless plug would work better if you gave us a link to your stuff on Soundclick. (I am very, very lazy!)
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Joined: May 2007
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Just noticed this thread--I've been here less than a month and it has been really helpful reading through the archives in the ABF to find many of my questions already answered. So, here's my story: (**warning: long**) I'm 31, and I started piano with group lessons about three years back, then took a two year break, and just got started on individual lessons last month. During that break I had tried to teach myself from a few other books (John Thompson, Carl Humphries, etc) but didn't get too far beyond just keeping my sight-reading skills barely alive, mostly because of the lack of disciplined practice. The reason I took up piano at 28 is perhaps a bit different than many people here. I grew up in India, and I didn't hear much piano music or even much western music beyond the typical 80s-90s pop/rock (and some 'golden oldies' from my dad's collection). I was somewhat involved in Indian music, much of which is famous for successfully combining elements from multiple musical traditions. So I had heard, for e.g. some western modulations in some raga-based songs, and some theme of Mozart 'imported' into a song ... on the whole I was completely stuck in that music = melody paradigm of Indian music (well, we do an awful lot of stuff with the melody, but that's another story). As a result, when I came here, I got to experience most of the western classical music repertoire (beyond some of the most well known works) for the first time only as an adult. Imagine the euphoria of discovering all the important works Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Chopin, Mahler, Dvorak and Stravinsky all at once (within a year or so) as an adult. I had been curious and listening to randomly picked up recordings from the libary, but the epiphany happened in a serious of extraordinary performance I found the recordings of... Gould's Goldbergs, Jaqueline du Pre's Elgar & Dvorak, Kleiber's Beethoven seventh & Brahms fourth, and Mullova's Bach Chaconne. I guess that in a way I was lucky that by the time I heard them, I was old enough to be deeply touched. So I decided to learn piano as a way to learn western music and its compositional process, learning the basics of harmony and polyphony, following scores and play simpler works and transcriptions of larger works, etc. The piano seemed to be the most comprehensive way of getting into it. Only after starting to tinker around with the keys that I realized that being able to play this wouldn't be so bad an idea. I know it's too late for me to learn to ever play virtuoso works (the Hammerklavier fugue, anyone?), but maybe in a decade or so I could be able to play some of the musically interesting gems that do not require the fingers of a Horowitz. So my goal is to be able to play some of the easy-on-the-finger but hard-on-the-brain pieces. I guess that's a bit over-ambitious, but I'm addicted and loving it About my progress so far: During the group lessons, we were following the Alfred 1 ( which we almost completed) and Bartok's Mikrokosmos 1. But I wasn't very excited about many of the Alfred pieces most of which had very boring left hand patterns (I am not experienced enough to improvise the harmony). Also, the pieces that other people found comfortingly familiar, were all strange to me, having never heard them growing up. I'm also a graduate student, with all the obvious budgetory constraints, so I had to start small, on a Privia PX100 digital. Recently I got really fed up with the noisy keys and the fact that even after practicing regularly on the it, I could hardly get out any sound between pppp and ffff on the practice acoustic pianos in our college. Obviously, I needed a practice instrument that would let me learn control of dynamics and tone, besides the key positions. So, I'm right now in the process of upgrading, trying to decide between a mid-range digital like CP33/P140/FP4, or renting a cheap upright for a year or two before upgrading. Any comments/suggestions on that dilemma are welcome.
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Instead of creating that new thread of mine, I could have posted it all in this topic. Sorry about that.
But let's do this. From the top:
I'm 32 years old, happily single, too lazy to look for another relationship. Currently living on Oahu island, Hawaii, and moved here from Alaska 10 years ago because I needed a change of climate in a big way.
Apart from learning how not to sound like a cat walking across the piano keys, I enjoy swimming, mountain biking, surfing (the internet that is. True surfing will be later), yoga, and thinking about starting scuba diving sometime in the future. Also I'm studying the Japanese language since it's a useful skill to have here, considering all the people from there that visit Hawaii.
I own one cat, or rather, he owns me. I'm well trained to feed, brush him, and open doors, on command.
On the musical side, both of my parents used to play in a local classic rock band in Alaska. My mother sang lead vocals, and my father played guitar. When I was 4, I remember him letting me try playing it, and I was just strumming the strings. He said it was really good.
In school I did play the trumpet in band class for a year, but stopped after that. The weird thing about learning the trumpet was trying to get used to the B-flat scale notation. A note on the "Middle C" line would be played as "B-flat below Middle C". My poor aching brain!
I'll stop for now, since I need to do some things. But I can't go anywhere without finding my keys.
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So great to hear about everybody! So interesting! We live in Arizona, Gilbert to be exact. When you live here year round...you just know that you need an indoor sport for the summer months which is why the piano is perfect. I mentioned that I have a son who is very talented on the piano but has a website for his classical guitar that he has been playing for as long as the piano. His website is www.mitchturbenson.com You can hear him play there. I am pretty much retired after years of selling high speed computer printers. My last employer, Xerox, laid off our entire division and I just could not find a sales position after that. I am a stain glass artist now and as a hobby, I show dogs. I show mainly Lowchens (Little Lion Dogs) and also show a Parson Russell Terrier who I train for agility competition as well. I have been married a very long time. I have three parrots as well. My African Grey is such a wonderful talker that he almost seems human. If the dogs bark he will say, "Be Quiet" and if they get near his cage he will yell "Get Outta There". Well, fun to "talk" to such a great group!
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Hi Everybody!
I am a new junior member who stumbled upon this thread while exploring the forum. Read through several introductions, though by no means a large fraction. What a fantastic group of people!
46 years of age, and about 2 years into learning the piano, I live in New Delhi with my two sons (both into guitar) and wife (who can sing wonderfully, but wouldn't agree with me).
Having played the guitar, I like to think that I had a head start in piano: a basic knowledge of musical notation, and nodding acquaintance with types of chords and such stuff as the circle of fifths. But I couldn't sight read even most rudimentary of music.
I was fortunate to find a good, hardworking teacher who started me onto doing things properly. Unfortunately, I had to give up the lessons because I moved out of the city.
But now I am back and determined to return to the lessons once again. Meanwhile, I have been practicing and improving (!) on my own.
(At least I can accompany myself while singing <em>Bridge Over Troubled Waters</em>, using all the 9th, diminished and suspended 7th chords.)
Although a new member of the forum, I've been reading your posts through the RSS feed for sometime.
Hope I am welcome in the group. Best wishes to all of you!
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Piano
by Gino2 - 04/17/24 02:34 PM
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Piano
by Gino2 - 04/17/24 02:23 PM
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