Alouette

I've gotten to 52 years old, and learned just now that the lyric is gentille alouette, and not - having learned the song during a Tyneside infancy - Johnty  (a diminutive of John or Johnson back home) Alouette.  I'd constructed Johnty Alouette as some bloke performing mysterious antics in French, like Frere Jacques, and had no idea it was a rather cruel song about torturing a nice wee lark.  Blimey.

But the tune is fun to play, with the two wee scales, RH then LH, and the long LH note as you do a RH scale, which is a first toe in the water of two hands playing together. It's great, this Synthesia. And with Alouette, I've begun to pay attention to the stats table, showing numbers of key-errors and percentage playing speed.  I'm aiming for no errors and 90% when I'm learning the melody, before going on to the rhythm.

I suppose Synthesia's  limit will be reached when you get pieces which mean you need to be looking at your hands more, and can't watch the dropping notes on the screen. This piano-learning might have the same shape of learning photography (which it's largely pushed aside, for now), starting out on digital before going analog once I've got the basics. Whenever the limit of Synthesia  is reached, we're going to need a bigger boat piano. There's a piano shaped space in the sitting room.