"Ahh, Music, a magic beyond all we do here!"

[mothwing]

So, who plays a musical instrument, and which?
I'm curious.

I am curious because I love musicians music and always envy musicians for their proficiency. My own career as a maker of music with any instrument is pretty short and filled with unrequited love.

When I was six, my mother thought it was a good idea to have me learn the recorder. I hated it. I was not alone with the teacher, there are other children there, I liked that, but I hated the lessons. I was bad. The teacher always had me play our homework assignment in front of everyone as a punishment because I couldn't keep up with the others. She was a fiend in human shape, another musician who had never made it and now got by by giving lessons to young children. I stopped going to those lessons fairly soon. I didn't even like the sound of the recorder, and the knowledge that I could go on to nicer instruments once I'd mastered that dreaded thing was not really a great consolation for me, either.

I always wanted to wake up and be able to play the Cello. It's my favourite instrument, but I fear that it's far too difficult to learn for me now. Or the piano. That might even be fun learning. I've always envied people who were able to play it, like angie_21_237 and, of course, Crocky.
I half-heartedly tried learning the tin whistle, with great sheet music with drawings of the whistle under each note so I could directly play according to the little drawings, but that was a very short-lived experiment. I never really managed to get proper notes out of the thing whenever I tried overblowing.

Currently, I'm thinking of learning how to play the trombone. Not easy either, but I really like the sound of that instrument, and it's possible fairly quickly to join a little amateur ensemble and play together with others, that's more fun than practising on my own, which I never keep up for long, I know myself. And I'm still looking for a choir, one that meets at a half-way decent time at a place that's half-way close by. The ones I found are either meeting on Thursday, when I have a seminar, or are just too far away. I somehow don't want to make an hour trip to get to my choir.

Comments

[mariebernadette.livejournal.com]

I took piano for a while and played clarinet in two community youth orchestras. For band, I switched around every year - tenor saxophone and percussion. In marching band I played mellophone. I haven't played any of those for over a year, though, because I just don't have the time. I still tinker with guitar, though.

Practicing a brass instrument in an apartment shakes the walls! That should be fun. You can also torture any pets you have by emptying your spit valve on them.

It is never too late to learn the cello or piano. Everyone has to start somewhere. Electric keyboards are good for apartments (getting the idea that I've gotten in trouble for this before?) because you can plug in your earphones and there's software out there you can hook up to your computer if you're trying to compose.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Whoa. That's a lot of instruments.

The wall-shaking is what I like about it, although I don't really enjoy the flatulent cow sounds I got out of the poor trombone the first time around. As for the spit valve, I think I have to take home Crocky's trombone just to try that out on my kitty. He'll love that.

Yep, the headphones are part of the reason why my fantasies about learning to play the piano strike me as more realistic as my Cello daydreams. They're far more practical, cheaper, and there are more piano teachers around than Cello teachers.

[mariebernadette.livejournal.com]

Usually if you can pick up a woodwind, a brass and a percussion instrument, it gets easy to adapt to others within the same groups. Before you learn transposing to different keys, it's kind of neat to learn how to read in different clefs.

I'm a tinkerer of many, master of kind of sort of not a whole lot. But it's fun. I'm in your camp where I enjoy ensembles much more than solos. I'm alright at auditions but solo judging turns me into a downright wreck.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Gah! Auditions. The thought alone makes me crawl back right to where I came from. I never felt proficient enough to join anything that required an audition. I think I'll stick with a small church choir until I've learned how to sight-read properly.