The return of Piano Practice

Music lessons were one of the less fun parts of growing up for me. For a while I was learning the violin (mainly so that when I took the violin case into school I could pretend to be a Chicago gangster). But then I got bored with that. And, once that my friends discovered that all I had in the case was a violin, and not a sub-machine gun, they got bored with it too. I got out of that practice regime by the neat trick of being really bad at it. Truly, I put the vile into violin. After complaints from the neighbours in the next town I gave that up and returned to what was supposed to be my first love, the piano. A substantial part of my childhood was spent hoping that mum and dad wouldn’t remember that I hadn’t done my practice that day.

Anyhoo, as things do, piano practice has now returned to my life. This time I’m using the Simply Piano app to keep track of my efforts and I must admit that I’m rather enjoying it. I’ve connected the iPad to my new piano and so it can tell what keys I’ve pressed and track my progress. The app has lots of content, including versions of tunes I quite like. It runs on subscription, but it is much cheaper than proper lessons.

The nice thing about learning an instrument (which of course completely passed me by when I was younger) is that when you are practicing you really can’t think of anything else. You are too busy focusing on why your hands won’t do what you want them to. So if you want to escape from the worries of the world for a while you can just go in there and do battle with something that you can’t play yet but would like to. Today I had a go at playing Beethoven. Beethoven won, but I’ll be back for another go tomorrow.