Adventures with the piano

My siblings and I all took lessons as kids, but we had a horrible piano teacher, and I drifted away from it, though I love it above all other instruments for its subtlety and versatility. We had a pretty crappy piano in the house for decades. I played it occasionally and wished I could muster the discipline to play more.

Then in 2020, you know how a lot of people took up new indoor hobbies? Well, we got a Yamaha Clavinova digital piano. It has changed my life! I cannot say enough good things about having a decent quality e-piano. The sound (through earbuds) is phenomenal (speakers ok, not exactly performance quality but who’s performing?). The convenience of being able to practice and bother no-one is great. I can record efforts to track progress, and listen to demo pieces. The various voices are fun to play with (I’ll often do my warmup exercises cycling through them, maybe lingering more on acoustic guitar, steel guitar, harpsichord). The one which sounds the most like our old piano is the ‘honkytonk’ setting; that might be a clue to why I didn’t play it more often.

So I’ve been catching up, trying to learn new pieces, getting decent at a few, and alternately focusing on a few more and hopping around a bunch like a grasshopper. Needless to say, grasshoppers can’t play the piano very well, but who’s to say they don’t have fun trying?

But enough words! The following sketches are what come to mind when I’ve been working on, or struggling with, certain passages.