It feels like no progress is made, but the brain is faulty at remembering

Yesterday my college aged son was home. He's been curious about the melodeon, so he picked it up. He, like I, feel it's a bit non-intuitive. It all seems to be going along swimmingly until you hit a half step on a scale on both the C row and G row. Adrian asked, "why did they do that?" And I know why, because of being able to play multiple button play sound harmonious, but it's a bugger for learning as a beginner!

I didn't have much time to tinker yesterday with all I detailed in yesterday's post, but I played a couple of things for him, one being a beginner thing so he could try. I breezed right through it like I knew what I was doing and at a decent tempo. And I played one of the pieces I'm working on now, buturing it.

Today, I spent an hour after lunch, working back to front of the recent exercises and pieces I've been working on and amazingly, it's getting better. The newer and harder stuff is rubbish. I'm taking it at like 1/5th the speed it's intended and it's full of missed notes and pauses and starts and stops. However, as I kept working backwards, the tempo picked up, the mistakes lessoned. Nothing is perfect, not even close, but I can feel that what I found hard a week ago, is now not so daunting. 

In the two weeks I've had the melodeon, I haven't made tremendous progress, but I'm learning and it's serving its purpose of being a stress-reliever. I'm not training to be a professional musician. With that said, I would like to be able to pick up the instrument and play quite a few pieces without it being horrible!

So, despite having  super full day tomorrow, I just spent an hour practicing. Perhaps I'll record where I'm at later, but now it's time to take a walk on this gloriously sunny and warm February Saturday afternoon.