Audio Geeking over at the Farmhouse
Joe is audio-geek blogging! I wish him luck. I've had the pleasure of hearing some of his stuff and it's great.
Me, I'm working on a lot of piano stuff that I never got with my childhood lessons - drilling on technique, effective song practicing, ear training, that kind of thing. I'm a huge fan of playing Scott Joplin's music; unfortunately, I've been practicing and reinforcing errors during most of my playing life. Then I was without a piano for 10 years and just got a new (used) one in October. Needless to say, I'm enjoying it immensely.
For some reason, I'm also deeply interested in memorizing some rags. I think it's because I really enjoy the idea of being able to sit down anywhere and rip something off without having to carry sheet music around. My recent acting is helping me with this, as I'm using some of the same techniques to learn music pieces as I've learned to memorize lines.
But the biggest hole in my past piano playing has been the playing by ear thing. I have been gifted with an amazing feel for music, but never learned how to play anything that wasn't written down note-for-note for me. I'm practicing with fake books, but it's slow going.
Bring on those demos, Joe! And if you don't have a band name, maybe some commenters could suggest some?
Comments
How much music theory do you know? I'm lousy at memorizing tunes, but my guitar teacher gave me some really great advice to help me out, which is that instead of trying to memorize the whole tune, memorize the key changes. If you can remember that the first 8 bars of "All The Things You Are" are a iii-vi-II-V-I-IV in Ab, you don't have to memorize all the chord changes, just the structure and the key.
Posted by: Farmer Joe | June 9, 2004 10:24 AM