Roads to Safe Places

For reasons only known to himself, my father once obtained an electric piano from a customer a couple of years ago. I think he said at the time that niaseath might get some use out of it because he can play the guitar and is, after all, The Musical One in the family. Since my brother can't play the piano and the thing has been sitting in Hesse up until last week, that plan was never put into action. Since my father's reorganising his flat he's asked me if we need it and I gladly accepted, and now we have an electric piano!



Crocky can't really use it to practice earnestly because she needs a grand piano for that, but it's good to prepare lessons and play around and for me, because I'm getting lessons, too. I started at the beginning of the week and just now spent a couple of hours with this beginner's version of Scarborough Fair and I Saw Three Ships. It's fun, but my progress on is very slow, as expected. It's a lot more fun to be a complete noob on the piano, though, seeing as the results are never quite as jarring to my ears as the strangled-cat sounds that I'm so good at producing on the trumpet.

So far, I'm not really giving up on the trumpet, but playing the piano is much more fun, so I'm rather pessimistic about the time I'll spend with the instrument in the future, what with the piano looking so inviting and the option to put in earphones and practicing around the clock and everything, which is a definite downside of the trumpet - which I can only practice very quietly and for a very limited amount of time in the afternoons. I wish I could be more optimistic about the likelihood of me losing interest in either or both of the instruments after a while - I'm just not that interested in music, and even though Crocky's enthusiasm is highly infective, I am not sure that I won't be spending my time with other things in future. It's very nice to dabble, though.

The only downside to the piano is that it did not like being left in a car over night and is now its speakers make rather alarming crackling noises occasionally. We had hoped that it'd get better after a while if the piano didn't react well to the moistness in the car and had to dry,  but we're worried. If this keeps persisting we'll have to have someone check it out.

A few weeks ago, after a semester-long break, I finally pulled myself together and started playing the trumpet regularly, and it's going rather well. Crocky said today that I might be ready to join her ensemble in August (well, technically, she said that if I put my mind to it, I might join them in June, but retracted upon seeing my panic-stricken expression and said August would do nicely, too).

The suggestion of joining the ranks of her brass ensemble is probably supposed to strengthen my resolve and give me more motivation (and make our practice sessions happen more frequently than every couple of months), but I don't see that happening so far.

I am not too sure. Our sessions have been very sporadic so far, and even though I can do some basics I don't feel certain enough to do anything serious. Maybe she was just trying to motivate me, or her pressing need for a trumpet makes her desperate (the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that it's the latter), but I can't see myself playing at that level yet.

Something that made me really happy was to find just how much easier it will be to play the hunting horn - the technique is the same. Can't wait to surprise my mother (it's her instrument) with my progress. Too bad it's too late for her birthday, but I doubt that my mother would be touched by a wobbly rendition of the soprano part in "dead fox" or something, anyway.