Jes Sayin' Howdy From the Sonoran Desert!

by ciberratt Mon Nov 02, 2009 2:30 pm

When I'm not in Tombstone gun fighting I'm in Tucson making music.

I played piano years ago in college and have always had one in the house to plunk on. I have used synths/MIDI controllers on and off for a long time but I only decided to get serious about it again in the past month both because I want to play it well and because I think it will be easier to compose songs on than the guitar. Plus the more instruments you understand the more doors for ideas you have open for song writing because each instrument has its own sound and nuances that trigger different creative paths and muses.

I played clarinet/bass clarinet for years way back in Jr High/High School and took music theory classes and I retained about 80-90% of it over the years due to playing the guitar. I'm also teaching myself Bass and Mandolin at the moment and have a fiddle and a flute waiting in the wings.

I started on Beethoven's Moon Light Sonata and the Animals House of The Rising Sun (I LOVE that old VOX Continental sound and have a VSTi that models it pretty well though I hope to snag an actual VOX on eBay eventually).

I recently quit working and put my studio back together (it had been mothballed for a few years while I wasted time trying to pretend I could fit into a 9-5 in the 'real' world) to focus on my music so hopefully I'll progress quickly. Right now my brain is working faster than my fingers. the muscle memory for piano is *way* different than for a guitar.

I found the vids on YouTube Saturday night and am up to 12 at the moment as the music theory stuff was all review for me. I'm hoping to pick up how to determine fingerings for playing and any instrument specific pointers I can. I'm not all that interested in the classical stuff. I appreciate it and all but I'm more interested in rock/be bop/country/industrial/techno as we are trying to put together a punk/americana/industrial band right now and I really have this obsession with the 60's VOX/Rhodes sound and I don't know anyone who can play piano or who wants to learn so it has sorta fallen to me (and I had planned to do it since I got the Steinway 5 years ago - lol) .

I think the biggest problem I have right now is the plastic keys on my KX8 are still all new and shiny and sometimes my fingers slip off - or it may be a hand position/control issue. Oh and my hands fingers are quite large so playing up in between the black keys is hard to do without inadvertently sounding the neighboring keys... on the up side I can grab a compound third with one hand if I had too...

Anyway, that's about it for an introduction.

CR