Day 24: Attempting to Teach Piano

Quite surprisingly, my brother shares my motivation to pick up piano again. Since I played piano three years longer than he did, I still remember how to play (although I did have a bit trouble reading bass clef in the beginning). However, my brother remembers nothing. He doesn't know the location of notes on the keys, how to do scales, or how to read bass clef at all. He can't read notes and play, and his weak fingers have trouble playing a C-major chord. It makes me want to face-palm.

So today I tried to teach a bit to my brother. Thank goodness he plays violin, or else he would be hopeless. I taught him the location of notes, but he still can't figure them out without counting from the middle C. I dug deep into my old piano books and found a junior Hanon book, which is a book of finger exercises for the piano. I flipped to the first one, and tried to get him to play it without his fingers tensing up or losing that ball shape that piano teachers remind you about many times. This kid has a long way to go.

Day Three: Tuning My Piano!

So today my piano got tuned for the first time in five years. Of course, it was severely out of tune. To save money, my family decided that instead of pitching everything up to the standard 440 calibration, we would instead tune everything in relationship to the middle A. That meant that the notes individually were not in tune, but they were the correct pitch intervals between each other.

It was kind of embarrassing when the tuner finished and I had to test out the piano. I haven't had a lesson for four years and the only thing I practice these days are Lady Gaga covers. So I went up to the piano and played the main melody of Fur Elise by Beethoven and struggled with the second part of it. Then I played the first slow part of Sonata Pathetique by Beethoven (I self-taught myself the first half of the first movement) and decided not to even attempt the extremely fast part to avoid utter humiliation. The tuner said "Good job" to me and told me to practice every day, and I nodded thinking "hahalolok".

But now my piano is beautiful again, I think I'm going to practice more seriously than just experimenting with chords for my covers. I'm going to get out the music for Pathetique and practice more thoroughly, especially my right hand for the fast part. I'm also going to get fluent in Fur Elise again. It's not really that hard of a piece, but I need to be able to solidly know at least one song before I can consider myself a piano player.