It's beginning to work out like I hoped it would. My fingers are beginning to understand where to go next on their own while I'm playing the scales. They're beginning to reach for the next note before I can think it there. That's pretty heady stuff for me. My plan is working.
I have the major scales pretty much memorized and can play all of them with both hands at the same time. The minor scales are coming along. I'm still using the letter names of the notes to make sure I stay in the minor key, but the fingering is something I'm just learning how it's done by myself now. That's lots of fun. It's my sense of things now that my fingers are showing me what's what rather than the other way around.
I've been wondering how to include the minor scales when I play the major scales following the Circle of Fifths. I play the major scale, and then the relative minor following it, then I go to the next major scale on the Circle of Fifths. I don't know if this considered an acceptable way a certified piano teacher would do it, but they had their chance at me and failed. I'm doing it this way so I'll be able to know what the relative minor to each major scale is. I want it to become second nature for me to just reach for one from the other handily. If I run into a better way to do it later on I'll change to that.
I've been hiding behind learning to play these scales for a couple of weeks now. I still think it was the right thing to do. I didn't have any approach to how I should finger the notes on the piano keyboard. That was a problem for me even though I only tinkered around with C Major and just the white keys. What I've accomplished so far in learning how to play the scales using the classical method of fingering is really giving me a solid idea of how to approach playing a particular passage in a way that I don't fumble all over myself trying to do it.
I stopped doing other exercises to learn to play these scales. It won't be long until I know how to play the scales. When I do have them all memorized, than I'll have not excuse not to return to the ear-training exercises and playing along with blues videos again. I feel like I'm really learning something by memorizing and playing these scales. Relationships I've only suspected are popping up all over the place. I find myself saying "Aha!" a lot. I wish I could come up with something a little more original.
My friend asked me the other day why I don't spend more time playing with other musicians like he does. He doesn't understand that I've already been crushed by my ignorance too many times to take any more chances with other musicians. It's sorta not fair to them to be held back by my ignorance.
I've been through these kinds of situations before. I know what I have to do to be comfortable trying to play with other people. I have to be able to understand what they're asking of me when they take the time to show me where they're at with what they're doing. I have to take the approach I'm taking so I can understand their lingo. I got gifts and talents to offer other musicians. They're usually patient with me because of that, but it's me that get all frustrated with they start describing what they expect from me in terms I oughta understand, but don't. If I can get the lingo down, I might not get so intimidated by my ignorance that I walk away.
I wanna be able to play anything I can play in any key or rhythm. I wanna be able to transpose whatever music I'm playing instantly to any key the other desires without a real preference that I'm more comfortable with. Nobody has ever suggested I might wanna do that. I made up my mind on my own. I hate rejection. I don't wanna experience it just because I can't play in any key requested. I've been the ignorant slut the other has had to adjust to because I didn't know how to play in but a few keys. I don't care if the other is so limited, as long as it ain't me.
If this progresses like it has in the last month or so i may just buy me another classical flute. If I could imitate the scales I'm learning to play on the piano keyboard and learn to do what I'm doing on the classical flute, I could have me a bunch of fun. Creating a visualized image of a piano keyboard in my mind's eye as a reference tool for figuring what to do next is the best thing I've done for-myself in a long time.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. The nostalgia the PBS fund drives toss out to get them pledges. Tonight's episode was on The Mommas and The Poppas. At least half of them are dead now. Heart attacks. What a way to go. Why not? You gotta go. What difference?
It hasn't been a real fruitful day. I spent a good part of the afternoon trying to upload some new sound files in my synthesizer. It didn't happen. I'll have to delete everything and try again. It appears to be a time for learning curves. All the learning curves I've encountered recently have to do with my latest musical binge.
Besides learning the major and minor scales on the keyboard, I'm attempting to learn how to download sounds over the internet and install them in the internal memory of my synthesizer. I subscribed to a discussion list about the synthesizer to get some help. They're trying to help me.
I also downloaded the Finale Notepad music publishing freeware. I'm trying to make time to finish the tutorial on how to use it. From what I've seen so far it's a matter of learning to use the command line to make things happen on the worksheet. I never realized composing music could be so easily digitized. These people seem to have thought of everything.
The best I've been able to do with composing is writing the words and guitar chords down on a legal pad or in a spiral-bound notebook. I used to do that a lot. Hanging on to stuff like that frightens me. It seems like my trying to claim it as my own stops the flow. If I were to dare to "make something of it", my creative abilities would dry up and blow away. It happens all the time. I know of whence I write.
That's not exactly true. I don't leave things to nature. I create the future in a way that I'll recognize it when it comes along. A prophet with an audience of One. Just in the same way I wake up in the night from a dream and wanna remember it. To remember it, I'll throw something i usually keep near my bed (like a sock or a shoe)across the room. When I have to look for it the next morning, because it's not in it's usual place, I might remember the dream from earlier on.
That's dealing with what I drempt as history. As yesterday's news. Lucid dreaming is the only real-time way to do the dreamtime. Where everything I encounter there is taken as plausible, but not quite convincing. As if I were actually there, yet aware that I'm dreaming. I sorta believe I am. I act like it's so, but i wouldn't swear to it in court or try to convince an ardent unbeliever. I choose myself over them.
I think I can and do manipulate events in my dream time dimensions just the same as I do in this sensory one. As far as I can tell (Remember my disclaimer. I'm prone to delusions of grandeur and claim it's positive hallucination), I live simultaneous lifetimes, and dreaming either at night or by day is how I segue from one lifetime/dimension to another. "Breaking up is hard to do."
It hasn't been a real fruitful day. I spent a good part of the afternoon trying to upload some new sound files in my synthesizer. It didn't happen. I'll have to delete everything and try again. It appears to be a time for learning curves. All the learning curves I've encountered recently have to do with my latest musical binge.
Besides learning the major and minor scales on the keyboard, I'm attempting to learn how to download sounds over the internet and install them in the internal memory of my synthesizer. I subscribed to a discussion list about the synthesizer to get some help. They're trying to help me.
I also downloaded the Finale Notepad music publishing freeware. I'm trying to make time to finish the tutorial on how to use it. From what I've seen so far it's a matter of learning to use the command line to make things happen on the worksheet. I never realized composing music could be so easily digitized. These people seem to have thought of everything.
The best I've been able to do with composing is writing the words and guitar chords down on a legal pad or in a spiral-bound notebook. I used to do that a lot. Hanging on to stuff like that frightens me. It seems like my trying to claim it as my own stops the flow. If I were to dare to "make something of it", my creative abilities would dry up and blow away. It happens all the time. I know of whence I write.
That's not exactly true. I don't leave things to nature. I create the future in a way that I'll recognize it when it comes along. A prophet with an audience of One. Just in the same way I wake up in the night from a dream and wanna remember it. To remember it, I'll throw something i usually keep near my bed (like a sock or a shoe)across the room. When I have to look for it the next morning, because it's not in it's usual place, I might remember the dream from earlier on.
That's dealing with what I drempt as history. As yesterday's news. Lucid dreaming is the only real-time way to do the dreamtime. Where everything I encounter there is taken as plausible, but not quite convincing. As if I were actually there, yet aware that I'm dreaming. I sorta believe I am. I act like it's so, but i wouldn't swear to it in court or try to convince an ardent unbeliever. I choose myself over them.
I think I can and do manipulate events in my dream time dimensions just the same as I do in this sensory one. As far as I can tell (Remember my disclaimer. I'm prone to delusions of grandeur and claim it's positive hallucination), I live simultaneous lifetimes, and dreaming either at night or by day is how I segue from one lifetime/dimension to another. "Breaking up is hard to do."
Monday, February 18, 2008
It rained all morning off and on. It was a "good" rain because it fell soft and often. As dry as it's been there wasn't a lot of runoff. I don't wanna listen to the weather reports for a few days. They're gonna be real practical and remind everybody we need a lot more to make up for what's not there. Some daring fellow dared to allow that the only way this drought could be ended would be to have a couple of good hurricanes. That wasn't so brave a prophecy. The natives have known for generations that we depend on the rain from tropical storms and hurricanes to farm around here. Much less maintain golf courses and lawns galore. If I were a young man I might start a business to build cisterns for people to save the water that runs off the roofs of their houses. If the ban on using sprinklers continues, people gone get the water for their plants anyway they can. They will have to have cisterns to store the black market water they'll pay for to have brought in secretly in fake automobile gas tanks like back in the bootlegging days. Water is the new oil.
I find myself in a sort of quandary about how to practice scales on the keyboard. I'm wanting a routine I can live with. A group of habits I keep melding together to grant myself my best hope for squeezing what I can out of repetition and redundancy. I've been doing some research on the internet to see if I can find a ready-made routine that appeals to me. I don't feel the necessity to reinvent the wheel.
Encountering the notion that there are several kinds of minor keys is a little disconcerting. I just didn't expect it. I only thought there were major keys and minor keys. I think there are just one kind of major key. It's when the minor keys come along that things get kinky. None of the different types of minor scales I've run into require changing much from the natural minor scale. Just a half step here and there. I don't know whether to practice all the various types and modes as I go through the Circle of Fifths or to practice the various types of minor keys and modes as part of the routine I use to practice the major and minor keys.
It doesn't really matter right now. I've barely memorized how to play the major and minor scales with the correct fingering patterns. I could practice just those scales for months and not perfect them. My seeking a practice routine that does what I want it to doesn't have to be all that lucid presently. I'm reading some articles from this online jazz book:
http://www.outsideshore.com/primer/primer/index.html
I don't know anything about the author other than the fact that his book is online and available free of charge. He offers it for sell if there on the site if you want a hardback copy. He is fairly easy to read. Even though I don't know what he's describing a lot of the time, I appear to get something from reading his opinions each time I dial in. The link above has the Table of Contents of his book if you scroll down. I read the content haphazardly. Whenever I'm in the mood I go there, click on some article or the other and just read for a while.
I find myself in a sort of quandary about how to practice scales on the keyboard. I'm wanting a routine I can live with. A group of habits I keep melding together to grant myself my best hope for squeezing what I can out of repetition and redundancy. I've been doing some research on the internet to see if I can find a ready-made routine that appeals to me. I don't feel the necessity to reinvent the wheel.
Encountering the notion that there are several kinds of minor keys is a little disconcerting. I just didn't expect it. I only thought there were major keys and minor keys. I think there are just one kind of major key. It's when the minor keys come along that things get kinky. None of the different types of minor scales I've run into require changing much from the natural minor scale. Just a half step here and there. I don't know whether to practice all the various types and modes as I go through the Circle of Fifths or to practice the various types of minor keys and modes as part of the routine I use to practice the major and minor keys.
It doesn't really matter right now. I've barely memorized how to play the major and minor scales with the correct fingering patterns. I could practice just those scales for months and not perfect them. My seeking a practice routine that does what I want it to doesn't have to be all that lucid presently. I'm reading some articles from this online jazz book:
http://www.outsideshore.com/primer/primer/index.html
I don't know anything about the author other than the fact that his book is online and available free of charge. He offers it for sell if there on the site if you want a hardback copy. He is fairly easy to read. Even though I don't know what he's describing a lot of the time, I appear to get something from reading his opinions each time I dial in. The link above has the Table of Contents of his book if you scroll down. I read the content haphazardly. Whenever I'm in the mood I go there, click on some article or the other and just read for a while.