Pig Sty Avenue

The Bairn announced, out of the blue, that she would love to have a guitar.  She's too small for one, of course, but she's about the right size for a ukulele, so I ordered one from Amazon - £13.95, plus another tenner or so for books.  It'll want tuning, of course, which is where this page comes in handy .

A reasonable aspiration .  How long?  One year?  Two?

We shall indeed.  It's a lovely wee tune to learn.  I've almost memorized it this morning, the idea being, when I encounter a piano, I want something to sit down and play on the bugger.  I've a feeling that my keyboard's keys are lighter than a proper piano's, and there'll be a bit of effort transferring the skills I've gotten so far.  Probably, at some point this year, I'll be in workplace with a piano.  I'll print off some simple music and scales, and work at it, but it's likely to be in a public place so I want something to avoid making a twat of myself initially. It feels right that this should be the first tune I learn by heart.

I mprovising the blues on the piano is a lot easier than you might think. It's a great way for beginners to sound very cool, without having to be as good as Oscar Peterson.  Forsooth.  I'm blogging this as a note-to-self, to have a closer look at 8note.com, see if it's worth the $20 they're after.  One day, perhaps when I'm marooned under a desert sun, I'll get around to making a comprehensive blog post about the numerous online sheet music resources.

 I read that Oscar Peterson was so good because he'd spent many, many hours at the piano with classical etudes.  Hmm.  Be a long time before I can while away a wet weekend with Liszt's tutelage.  Meanwhile, though, I'm doing ok, learning how to play Old McDonald Had A Farm.

WTF is all this, I said to myself.  I do remember, at some point in the late 60s, it would have been, my sister talking about Every Good Boy Deserves Food.  Something she'd got from her music lessons at school, something which had passed me by when I went through the same class a couple of years earlier.  I don't know how she got this far, and I didn't.  The only thing I remember about those classes was their utter lack of music - there was some rather shameful fingering of a keyboard made from card.  The classroom was half full of musical instruments, which woe-betide anyone if they tried to have a go. Forty years later, however, I've returned in happier circs to these deserving wee boys.  Here are some of the other EGBDF mnemonics . I'm probably going to have to find one of my own.  And also invest all of the tones with personality as I try to process their sounds with their places on the staff and on the keyboard.  This is it, kids.  Thi...

Performed by Chin King .  I need to go to China.

Here's a good place for beginner pieces on pdf, with midi too.  If learning to play the piano is like going on a long walk, I've got about thirty miles already, thousands to go.  The reasoning is that if it takes (say) 1500 hours to learn to play reasonably well, and if you walk at three miles per hour, you could walk 4500 miles in that time.  So, I could theoretically walk from our house to, say, Tripoli, and back, and take in a few detours.  My God!  Can that be right?

This is a wee tune for practising the left hand.  I know it, but can't place it. 

We could never reasonably house a piano in our wee flat.  The old harmoniums you can buy for almost nothing on eBay look churchy to the point of spooky-gothic.  Those Indian portable ones sound a bit crap. Why not a  piano accordion ?  I love the sound they make.  Years ago, I used to hang out with a group of blokes who played Irish music in pubs.  We had some great times.  Of course, being a non-musician I was always on the fringe.  They were always encouraging me to learn to the tin-whistle, but back then I was more interested in drink and skirt, and didn't have the patience to practice.  The piano accordion was the heart of the group.  It seemed very intimidating then, but now it looks playable.  Voila.

My last right-hand-only practice piece, because next I'm starting on the bass clef.

I blogged here , a few weeks ago, that I was going to start again with the peyote.  I had a look at my surviving plants last night.  One of them is nearly an inch across.  Three are just over half an inch.  One is a quarter of an inch.  Two are less than a quarter of an inch, shrivelled, and look fit to die.  I had put four of them into a 7" pot, and three into another.  The one which is an inch across has managed to put a big tap root down, and was getting enough water.  The others, especially the two runts, clearly weren't.  So, multiple planting is NOT a good idea.  I potted them all back each into wee pots, and gave them a good drink.  I'll watch them all more closely from now on. And I thought about buying more seeds, maybe 40, but we really don't have the windowsill space for any more, so I'll stick to these - maybe supplement them with one or two adults bought in, and maybe I'll start getting my own seeds.  Anyway rou...

Woohoo!

This is largely overlooked by the football press.   But we're doing very well .  A quality youth team, that's the way ahead.    

'Davis said, "I've sure learned a lot from Bill Evans. He plays the piano the way it should be played".'

Today was a good day.  I spent an hour or so simply playing a five finger scale, with my thumb on Middle C. Backwards and forwards.  The fingers are beginning to learn to sit still.  And then I did the exercise in PSP on eighth notes, and eventually managed to do it error free.  It's C to G and back again, twice, and then C to F and back again twice, all 8ths but the last C a full note as a wee flourish.  Then I practised that scale, always in C but up and down the keyboard, and with my left hand, too. The next exercise is the same but in 16ths.  I had a go but can't do that yet.  However, I couldn't do the 8ths this morning, and now I can.

"They kept players with bollocks who showed a collective strength. It takes courage to get a big club promoted and Newcastle's players have shown balls." And the warm-hearted Ms Taylor finds herself uncharacteristically unable to sneer. 

" Y oung Oscar was persistent at practising scales and classical etudes daily, and thanks to such arduous practice he developed his astonishing virtuosity. "

I've lifted this list wholesale from here . Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Teddy Wilson, Jan Hammer, McCoy Tyner, Kenny Kirkland, Joe Sample (The Crusaders), Bob James, George Duke, Red Garland, Lyle Mays, Wynton Kelly, Walter Bishop Jr., Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Art Tatum, Nat King Cole, Franck Amsallem, Kenny Barron, Russell Ferrante (Yellowjackets), Tommy Flanagan, Horace Parlan, Kenny Drew, Jay McShann, Chuck Leavell, Tom Rainier, Jay Wagner, Thelonious Monk, Vernell Brown Jr., Dodo Mamarosa, Rob Whitlock, Bud Powell, T. Lavitz, George Cables, Michael Melvoin, Victor Feldman, Diana Krall I blog the word "pianists", but would avoid it in ordinary speech because it can get slurred into a vital but hilarious bit of male anatomy. Off colour puns apart, thank God, sometimes for the Internet.  I'm going to blog about each of these lads and lasses, eventually, just a Wikipedia and YouTube link.

Here's another source of sheet music and midis.  A lot of the files are Finale, (.mus).  I've downloaded the free Finale viewer, but Chrome doesn't seem to have a plug in for it.  Nor will it run in IE.  If you right click and save file as, it still won't read it.  The pdfs on that page are fine.

Here's some interesting stuff on exercises at the keyboard , (together with a hinted tale of Schumann's foolishness). And here are some exercises to use away from the keyboard .

This evening will be a big evening .

F or the Magpies to blow promotion now – with five emphatic straight defeats – would take capitulation on a scale beyond even a football club which specialises in epic disappointment, and then some.

That's what this video is saying .  No mention of that so far in the PSP software.  This advice is reiterated, after a fashion, at the bottom of this page .  If you can get by the rather irksome attempt at folksy prose,   this is a very good source of beginners' exercises . This looks as if it's a bit further down the road, but I found it whilst googling my way to the fingers-laying-still-on-keys business.  I found this white-cat-black-cat video on this site here .  I like the teacher's accent.

Fre-re Jac-que, Fre-re Jac-que... Dormez-vouz?  Dormez-vouz? What I learned yesterday is: you cannot run the PSP learning software at the same time as the KeyRig 49's own software, duh. Only one of them can use the midi at once.  In fact, I won't be using the KeyRig software again for ages, so I can solve its problems, (the alleged lack of certificate and its defaulting to the sound of a particularly low rent electric organ) much later.  The PSP is its own midi software for the keyboard, and will hear it as any one of 128 (is it?) musical instruments - so I'm back to playing on a concert grand piano, for now. And so, at last, I got started on the theory lessons,  how to sit, and hold one's hand.  The PSP software is doing what I wanted of it, once we got started, that is, giving interactive graphics of the music and the keyboard as you play.  Sorted.  The only downside is that instruction is given by those American actors' voices that we associate ...

This much I've learned about installing my new friend Adventus Piano Suite Premier, and that is, for Vista 32 SP2, anyway, don't try to do it from the auto-run thingummy that pops up.  Instead, go onto the CD and right click on the set up program, and then run as admin .  And then it seemed to work, (after several abortive attempts to install it from the auto run).  But I don't know if it's really working, yet, because now the keyboard software has gone kaput and PSP can't read it.  So now I'm trying the umpteenth reinstall of that.

Problem signature:   Problem Event Name: APPCRASH   Application Name: PSuite.exe   Application Version: 0.0.0.0   Application Timestamp: 2a425e19   Fault Module Name: kernel32.dll   Fault Module Version: 6.0.6002.18005   Fault Module Timestamp: 49e037dd   Exception Code: c0000005   Exception Offset: 000bf9cd   OS Version: 6.0.6002.2.2.0.768.3   Locale ID: 2057   Additional Information 1: b37c   Additional Information 2: 2a7328d8bb40c81c93b4b5f46adb8e10   Additional Information 3: b37c   Additional Information 4: 2a7328d8bb40c81c93b4b5f46adb8e10 Read our privacy statement:   http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=50163&clcid=0x0409 You.  Fucking.  Bastards

Those who reviewed the KeyRig 49 and said there were no installation problems were very lucky indeed.  24 hours on and it's still not working properly.   It's kind of working again now, but I can't get it to sound like a piano (as it did when first installed, despite the popping), it sounds like any one of many various kinds of organ, now.  And it won't let me certify it - perhaps because I've already done so once, yesterday, but it's a fucking annoyance to have it tell me "this product is not certified" every time I launch it...  And the "help" PDF seems to have disappeared somewhere... I've tried for several hours this morning to sort out these wrinkles, prior to loading the teaching software.  But now I'm going to do that, and see what happens...  And I've just thought, I can probably get the help file from the CD. Grade 8 in five years?  If I get the feckin' software working by then...

The keyboard arrived yesterday morning via some kind of courier, and the software this morning in the post.  Which is cool as I ordered them online last weekend. Last night, sans the learning software, I had a look at online videos regarding hand position (there are lots).  They were of variable quality, and sometimes difficult to make your way through sequentially, and I would like to go back to them and maybe review them if/when I get time. Yesterday evening was me playing C D E F G with my right hand, and sometimes G F E D C for variety.  It's going to take a surprising amount of effort to get the four non-operating digits to stay still whilst their wee pal does the work of the moment. On the technical side, the software, (including a Vista update) took nearly an hour to load.  And there's a very distracting wee crackle from somewhere.  Something made me think it might be some sort of conflict, so I went into the audio settings on the laptop for a shufty,...