Lurker de-lurking

by Karla Marx Thu Apr 02, 2009 5:19 pm

I am a chronic lurker but for some reason I'm coming out finally Cool

I'm an British expat living in Japan for about 3 years now. Why I'm here? Good question. Lets just say pursuit of uh cultural interests.

I had a keyboard as a kid, plinky plonked around. Learned to play guitar in my teens. Then I watched a Japanese dorama about music school students (nodame cantible) and decided piano was really cool. But I'm too old/I don't have the dedication to learn...
Three years later I go home for Christmas, and I am around my mother's boyfriend's mother's house (oh that's complicated...) She plays organ, and I say I wish I could play piano. And my mother is like, just do it...
And I think.....you know what, why not?

So I started lessons, it wasn't hard to find a teacher there's like a billion piano teachers in Japan I'd say about a 3rd of people here have played at some point in their life (*cough* pushy parents). My Japanese is pretty good, music is international, doing lessons in Japanese wouldn't be a problem I thought.....and it wasn't until she goes 'so this is DO REI MI FA SO' and I'm like...wut?
Flash back to when I work in a Elementary School, and I'm talking to a teacher and this DO REI MI stuff comes up. I was like, I dunno what that is really I never learnt it, and the teacher is...you must have learnt it at school. I was like no....but music was never a big thing at my schools so I never thought about it.
And it dawns on me, they more commonly name the notes DO REI MI etc. rather than ABCDEFG. I don't know why I didn't realise earlier.

The second lesson, I finally plucked up the courage to tell the teacher I've only ever refered to notes by the alphabet names, and she's like oh, guess that's how they do it in English speaking countries. So now she's just refering to the alphabet names, which is a relief because it was too much trying to convert it in my head and concentrate on playing at the same time.

Well anyway my goal is to just...play stuff lol. Ok I admit it final fantasy themes (I'm <3 the crisis core sound track at the moment). Gimme 5 or 10 years...

kk I go back to lurking now. Laters! Very Happy