Everything has arrived and trying it out!

First, Friday afternoon the melodeon in GC method book arrived. Yay!!!

Saturday early afternoon the two melodeon's arrived, but I am currently waiting to open the box because I was advised to let them slowly warm up before opening it to prevent condensation from forming. Amazingly,  I have patience. Why? Because I have so many other things on my plate. Today is my one and only day off in a week and well, it's always kind of full!

But I am a bit amazed at myself for this lust/need to learn. For over a month now I have been researching and looking and asking questions. The last two days while working, I've had different mixed lists of accordion/melodeon players youtube videos playing in the background. Like right now while writing this. I'm listening to a mix of "accordeon diatonique". I have never had this passion or need of just "I have to do this". Of course, I've never felt so much prolonged stress before either.

I hope it's like I remember of a high school acquaintance. Here's her story. There was a girl in middle school, a year behind me, who played the French Horn. She hated it and was pretty awful at it. She really wanted to switch to flute. The band teacher wouldn't allow it because he was desperate for horn players and was drowning in flute players. She kept pressuring him. Finally he relented. Within one semester - 4 months, she went from last flute player to the best flute player of about 15 flutists. She just had a passion and, therefore, put out more effort. In 10th grade she made all-state for flute. She was going nowhere on the horn... the passion wasn't there.

Now, I'm not saying I'm going to be a super star. But if I keep this passion, I should get to "passing" ability more quickly.

I'm also excited because it's a hobby that can fit in with my life - no mess so no clean-up. This so uber appealing to me right now.

Now to figure out how to record things!
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That above was written before unpacking them and trying it out.

First, Scott did a great job of packing these! And the Liliput case and Liliput are so tiny! (unpacked Liliput not shown)

And then, it's practicing. playandlearn on melnet posted just a week or so before I was to receive the GC Melodeon some tutorials/exercises for learning some basics to learn a piece called Valse Triste. He made 4 videos for a beginner. Well you can't get more beginner than day 1 of ever holding the instrument!

As I figured, learning to separate my two hands was/is going to be hardest thign to first figure out as fingers like to do the same at the same time with the same fingers. I could get this exercise about 75% of the time right for fingers on the right buttons (after an hour or so of building up to that). However, my fingers want to both do the same thing - either both hands legato or both hands staccato. And, of course, I'm just figuring out the bellows of how much air for the phrase I'm trying to play, etc. It's a lot of things to concentrate on at the same time.

All in all it went as expected.  Here is after an hour of practicing the first video lesson. I'm not done with that video yet as I am still working on being consistent and with separating those hands as if they were controlled by two brains instead of one.

As per usual Melissa - I don't dress up for such things. This is Melissa, at the end of a day, sans makeup, just as I am... raw footage on a crappy IPad Air 1 camera. But hey, it works.  Tomorrow I'll probably look a bit better as Sundays are the "big work day" but I'm also likely to be more frazzled.

Enjoy and cringe and laugh with me. Now, if you have some tips for me... be nice, but I'll listen!

First attempt at Recording... Oops!

Second attempt. I was distracted by the camera... semi-oops!

Third attempt. I tried hard to concentrate on what I was doing... but putting it all together - even in such a simple oompa-pa-pa and two notes on the other... not so simple! I tried to zone out to not really 'see' the camera.

It can only get better from here! Here is what these exercises are building up to (someday).

And thank you Sean for the method book and Scott for the button box!