Going Back

After all the years of learning different instruments, I did eventually go back to the piano. Almost every day, I hear my mom playing the piano or I hear some beautiful piano pieces in certain songs.  As I listen I can picture what their hands are doing and how to create that melody myself, so one day I decided to sit back down at the piano and try to plunk out a melody.

From the piano lessons I took many years ago, I didn’t get very far in my playing abilities. I understood timing and reading music, but reading the notes on a page then interpreting it on the piano was a struggle. Now that a lot of time has gone by and I haven’t been practicing my music reading abilities (or lack thereof), I can no longer take a sheet of music and play it without some help of a pen to write down the letters of the notes. It’s funny how I’ve forgotten the letters of the notes on a page, but never the letters on the piano itself. But at least I remembered something, right?

Even though I couldn’t read music, I still wanted to play… very much. I knew that if I only learned the pattern of the notes and memorized them I would be able to play it with no problem. That is probably the only reason I was able to learn the music during piano lessons. If I couldn’t get it, my teacher would play it for me and then I would able to play It, with no problems.  So, I looked up a video of a simple song, written by a young girl and I would ware out the “play”, “pause”, and “rewind” buttons to memorize how to play the song.  I would watch one about one measure of the tune on my laptop that sat on my lap as I sat in front of the piano, and then played it myself. Yes, it was very time consuming, but I was having loads of fun doing it! More fun than I would have had relearning how to read music and then finding the sheet music. I also think this was a lot easier for me, because I can learn a lot from ear.

I began to continue with this method of learning songs, by looking up a video of someone playing it.  I soon realized, however, that with some songs only provided the sheet music and no videos of anyone playing it in a way that I could learn it myself. Nevertheless, I was determined to find a way to learn these songs, but I’ll save that story for another time.