I noticed last night that it\u2019s been nearly six months since I bought my electric piano and started learning more about playing it. Figured that makes this a good time for a checkin.<\/p>\r\n
Short version: I\u2019m still enjoying it a lot. I\u2019m still practicing about 20 minutes a day, with the iOS app Simply Piano.<\/p>\r\n
Long version:<\/p>\r\n
A month or two ago, I got partway through the Intermediate II lessons (Intermediate II is roughly the 12th set of lessons, out of about 28 sets, so I\u2019m less than halfway done with the app\u2019s lessons), and then I noticed that I hadn\u2019t been keeping up with playing the songs that they provide in addition to the lessons. (Each song gradually walks you through learning to play the melody or the accompanying chords, then has you play the whole song (with accompanying percussion and vocals and such, with the sheet music scrolling by in time to the music) and rates you on how well you did.)<\/p>\r\n
So I put the lessons part of the app on hold, and went through about three songs a day for several weeks. I thought I had finally caught up yesterday (there are over 250 songs so far in the song part of the app, and I think I had previously gone through less than half of those), so today I started doing the Intermediate II lessons again. Only it turns out that I had missed one batch of songs, so I have another 17 or so to go through to really catch up. But I\u2019m close to caught up.<\/p>\r\n
Anyway, in today\u2019s lessons, one of the songs that I went through the basics of was \u201cShut Up and Dance,\u201d by WALK THE MOON, which I already knew was catchy but also turns out to be a lot of fun to play. It\u2019s still running through my head. I\u2019m looking forward to coming back to that song later when my skills are more polished.<\/p>\r\n
The current lessons are about switching the right hand smoothly among C, D, and F positions. I\u2019m gradually getting the hang of that. Meanwhile, going through all those songs has gotten me to the point where my hands more or less automatically move into the right positions for the chords I\u2019ve learned so far (Am, C, Dm, E, F, G), without my having to consciously think about it much. (In much the same way that I don\u2019t have to consciously think about where the letters are when I\u2019m typing.) I\u2019m still not super fluid in all this, but have come a long way in the past six months.<\/p>\r\n
And I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever before practiced anything as regularly as I\u2019ve been practicing piano. Part of that is the gamification, and part is just that it\u2019s fun<\/em>. And I\u2019m mostly taking my time with it; when I start to make a lot of mistakes on a given day, or when I just feel like that\u2019s enough for one day, I stop.<\/p>\r\n Part of it may also be that I didn\u2019t have to start completely from scratch; a few years of violin in middle school and high school, and early exposure to piano keyboards, left me able to sight-read treble clef reasonably well, and I already know about sharps and flats and note durations and various other things that I might have been too intimidated by if I had no grounding in it at all. (I often don\u2019t manage to get into growth mindset for learning new things; if something is too hard at the start, I often just give up.)<\/p>\r\n But another part of it is that the way this app teaches works really well for me. I\u2019m sure it doesn\u2019t match everyone\u2019s style, and there are aspects here and there that bug me; but overall, I think it\u2019s great.<\/p>\r\n Anyway. Still enjoying it, still looking forward to continuing.<\/p>\r\n (No advice, please.)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18530"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18534,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18530\/revisions\/18534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}