Being a beginner totally stinks

There is just so much to learn and nothing is intuitive and it's not much stress relief if it's having to learn and practice dreadfully. I mean, I am learning and I'm not getting impatient enough that I'll quit, but when I hear all these tunes and I cannot play any of them, and it feels like it will be a thousand years before I can play any of them, it's a drag. Like today, The piece that was introduced in the book today has 16th notes on basses (left hand) and quarter, 8th and 16th notes on the right hand and those 16th notes are opposite of the ones played on the basses. The 16th on right hand against the 16th note on left hand is so unnatural to me that I feel like I'll never get it. The recording I have of the song has it at speed and slowly. I can't play it if you halve the tempo at the slow version. Sigh.

And you wouldn't think I would have problems playing on and off the beat as I am a horn player and horns always get the offbeats while most of the the rest of the band is playing on the beat, but that is a different skill to be learned. This is learning to untie my hands.  When I was talking to my son about that, he said he remembers how hard that was in learning to play the piano too and that in itself is so interesting. It's not like we do the same things with our hands. Right now typing - my hands are working independently. I can drum fairly well (rhythmically using my hands and feet differently from each other) when drumming on the table or my lap. What is it about piano and the button box? I'm seeing progress in that, but any slight new step in making the hands more and more independent leads to a new skill that needs to be developed.

Now, I have only played it through a few times - or tried to play it through. I can't. I'll have to dissect it more and just have patience.

Maybe I'll record some of it. Here is a violin version of the piece, just to give you an idea of how it is supposed to sound: Reel du Sirop D'erable

Here is me... OMG... It's embarrassing to share as it is so, so, so bad. Well, it does say the song means maple syrup... maybe maple syrup is in my melodeon thus making it sound horrible?

I did two takes - no clipping, stopping before the end. Totally lost the thread, etc.

Take one. Stopped midway through.

Take two. Struggled horribly through - embarrassing to even share.

Playing it at the piano - sloppily - right hand only. I'm not a piano player, but it gives you a sense of what I'm trying to play.

The art I'm sharing today? It's how I feel when I play - dufus.

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.

Not much time, but practicing where I can

Life has gotten busy the last couple days. I was commuting or at the office 14 hours on Thursday. I brought the GC instrument in case I found time to practice, but I did not. Today is a work from home day and I started bright and early, but between work with two jobs, making meals, teaching my older son to drive, spending time homeschooling my younger son, and grocery shopping, I was only able to nab about 15 minutes total. Tomorrow should be better.

To wind down the last two days, however, I started nabbing things for pinterest to post different forms of (non photographic) artwork pieces that included some type of squeeze box. I'll probably divide them out by theme/style at some point, but from about midnight until 2 am yesterday I grabbed about 400 of them, and today between 11 pm and 12:20 am, I grabbed the rest. There's probably some duplicates in there, but I have nearly enough pieces to supply 3 years of posts with accordion, concertina, and melodeon images. You can tell it's an important instrument through the last 100 years just by the shear number of things I found in such a quick time. Here is the link to the board. I've also created a Pinterest link on the sidebar.

I decided I would use a piece or two a day to include on this blog. Today I picked a cute pair - before and after. With more searching, I found a different pair, but quite similar. I'm not sure if the second pair are also Riedler or a copy cat artist... but they're cute. Looking forward to some more practice time, but if you want to see the stash of squeeze box images, feel free to take a peek on Pinterest.

Solving puzzles

The last couple days of practicing have been bits and pieces of time here and there, not long stretches, but I'm practicing. One thing I am struggling with is (in my head) what is the best way to remember bellow direction.

The music, pretty universally that I have seen so far, is written on staff with button number with the underline or no underline and basses either written in on its own line or like with guitar chords, written in over the staff. But there is no universal. Here I was trying to force myself to do something that is actually quite unnatural to me. I was trying to look at the notes on a staff and just remember what direction the bellows go. Well, this is somewhat unnatural because bellows switch based on key of instrument (I think?) and which row/button they land on. I cannot explain it well, but it is a thing either memorizing a song or written notation makes it easier.

So, the notes for the GC melodeon are these. Each button is two notes - both treble and bass side. Here's the keyboard layout.

And this is how the method book I'm using writes out music. Top section of music shows the notes written on a staff with fingering help noted just below the notes (the bad habit I've been forming is following those because it's telling me which finger to play and which direction of bellows - Underline is pull, not underlined is push.

Below that is C row - it's empty because everything in this piece is written on G row. 

Directly below the C row is the G row, and then you see different fingerings with some being underlined and some not. This is precisely telling me which button to push or pull. So, you see the first two measures it's 3 4 5 4. That means I should play the third button on the G row, then the 4 and then the 5 - all on pull, and then next measure back to 4th button on the push.

Directly below the G line on the top section of music (first 6 measures) the basses are written in with the rhythm of what to play being the bottom most thing shown. The second section of music is the same, but this time they took out the bass line. I was first confused by this because I didn't know what that meant. Do I not play basses? or was I supposed to just figure it out? But, I figured out that they were giving me bass information above the staff line for the first time. 

But there are other ways of notating music for the meldeon too. Here are some (found publicly on a google search). And I probably didn't capture them all.

All of them I now can figure out what they are implying, but there isn't a standard. And then I had a super "aha!" moment. This is for me. Not to please a teacher or to play while sight reading with no help. I am doing this for me, so if I want to scribble all over the music, or rewrite things to work for how my brain processes the music, then I just need to do what works for me. Even in my son's piano lessons and my years in band, we would make our own notes to remind ourselves of what to do. So, why have I been limiting myself and getting mad at myself for needing the fingering guides? Reality is, once the piece is in my head better, I will only be using the staff to remind myself of going up or down in notes and to remember the rhythm. Later, I can just ditch the music altogether. 

So, if, for now, it feels better to pay attention to fingering guides, fine. And if I know the rhythm in my head and just want to know fingering, then use fingering, or button guides. It's just notes for myself. It's not cheating! I can have crutches. I am not training in classical piano. Just like as a teen I would rewrite Eb music to F because I could never transcribe music in my head to play along at speed. 

Two steps forward, one step back?

That is what it felt like today - a disaster of some sort. Like I took a step back. I played better two days ago than I did today! Wah! I couldn't untie my hands well with 3/4 time. I was mis-remembering all the push-pull and where the buttons were. I was totally relying on the fingering help row - the one thing that I shouldn't look at as I'm learning as those will disappear soon. ACK! It may be Valentine's Day, but the melodeon wasn't showing me much love today. Wah!

But I stuck with it for almost an hour. That is the way it goes sometimes. Though, I didn't have it in me to go back to stumble so terribly through things I did 4-5 days ago, so I stuck with things mostly I got to a couple days ago in the G row, but a couple in the C row too. Maybe I'm just tired today. I don't know.

But, I'm not feeling overly satisfied. I'm having to remind myself that today is only day 9 or so and I missed two days of practice, so it's only day 7 - 7 hours is not a lot of time to master anything! Even simple little tunes.

I did play (right hand only) twinkle twinkle from my head and that came instantly, so there is progress, but man is it slow.

Here is a march that isn't very marchy that I got to a 3 days ago. And following that is waltz that I got to today. So, I've gone through this, stumbling and falling, a couple of times before recording it. Learning something new and it shows the painful process. Yes, it's that bad! I post it because one day, I'll see, "Wow, look how far you've come!" I hope!

A breakthrough of sorts? A leap forward!

And grrr... I had completed my entire blog post last night and lost it completely when I went to add in a photo. I had forgotten my Chromebook at work and was using my iPad. Ipad and Google don't always play nicely together and Blogger is one of them that has problems. I had such a nice, timely, as it was happening, post... that disappeared and no "back button", refresh, close and re-open could retrieve the body of the post. It still shows as an empty draft post on the iPad, but not even that on my Chromebook. Sigh...

So, what I was posting about last night was a significant leap in playing last night. I started with how I find the learning process quite fascinating. I remember how fascinated I was when my boys were young at how they couldn't do something one day and the next day they could. I told a story of how my son "chose" his right hand one day. It was such an obvious thinking process. His whole infancy his left side seemed dominant. He kicked harder with his left leg. All skills he acquired began with left side and then he would switch to right side. This included using his spoon. My son had been using the spoon for a few months with his left hand. Then one day while sitting in his high chair he looked at the spoon in his left hand. He looked at his spoon-less right hand. He transferred the spoon to his right hand, looked back and forth at his two hands, and then started eating with his right hand and from then on out, he favored his right side for everything. That process is forever etched in my brain.

Learning to read is a great example of how a switch in the brain just happens. Until that switch happens, natural, smooth reading will not occur. Our oldest son was "reading" sight words and sound it out words when he two years old - self-taught. We never forced it. He could sound out books, but that was sounding out words, not reading. Then one day around  4 1/2 he just got it and started reading books for meaning and it just took off quickly from there.

My younger son knew all his letters, upper and lower case by 20 months (self-taught), and was learning sight words (never by sound it out) when he was two. He learned how to truly read by 4.5 by linking sight words together in a story making, meaningful way. 

Neither of them did anything to make it happen. We didn't practice anything to make it happen. It just needed a brain development connection to happen, even with two different approaches of learning how to read.

That is kind what I felt like with last night's practicing on the melodeon. Something in my brain just clicked last night. Of course, I had been practicing, so it wasn't just a growth developmental change, but a brain connection was made last night because of the practicing I had been doing and overnight something clicked in my brain to make the next day easier.

Now, it's still plain dreadful playing. Just ask my 11 year old. He'll gladly tell you it's awful, but something clicked when I picked up the instrument this Sunday. Mindful of a bad habit I was forming (of reading fingering hints for the notes to play), I discovered, that while I still wanted to do that, I was beginning to sense where the note would be on the box and if it were push or pull. It's hard to describe, but I was beginning to fully realize, "Oh, that's a half step, so it's going to be pull pull when in this key and octave". Of course, this is at super rudimentary stage and while I'm practicing/learning different parts of the box piece by piece, but I just moved to G Row yesterday and it clicked almost immediately.

Another, more significant change was that I am beginning to move my hands independently. When I tried a week ago when I first got the box I could not disconnect the two hands at all. (When I was typing this up yesterday I thought it had been two weeks of learning already, when it had only been a week. Man, last week was long!)

The first week it had me playing Gg or Cc. When I went to G row it started me with Dd or Gg either in 2/4 or 4/4 time. It sort of makes you play your hands separately, but not really as it's a simple back and forth between the two fingers at the same tempo either Cc/Gg or CcCc/GgGg while treble had quarter, half, and eighth notes following a similar pattern on both hands - if a treble note changed, so did a bass note. Only difference being if a treble note were sustained in the right hand but continued in the same pattern in the left hand.

Last night they introduced 3/4 time which is not a simple back and forth in the basses, but Ggg and Ddd, while in the right hand it continued the same pattern of quarter, half note, or all quarter notes or all eighth notes. Anyway, I had tried to do an Oompa pah pattern on the first day I got the box and no way Jose could I do that! But a week in and I could with no problem at all with these exercises.

As I said, it's all rudimentary, but so far, everything I've had to do, it was slow everything down to snail's pace and just work it through with no seeming moments of, "I got it!". Until last night.

I didn't really "need" to know that E was push or pull and played by my 4th finger, I could sense it could be. It made learning the exercises a bit faster.

With that said, everything is full of mistakes and hesitation, but with far less feeling of "What is this new thing they are throwing at me" feel to it. I still go back through most of the exercise to try to master them all better so that they get cleaner, but whereas the first day I used the book I did 3 exercises, last night I did 8! I stopped because of time and realizing I was mastering none, but it is beginning to click... which is great.

I didn't record anything because of leaving my computer and phone at work, and the changes I feel are probably not hearable, but it felt like something bigger was happening. Now it is keeping my pace and not trying to move on too quickly before I really master anything. Though, maybe that isn't as relevant for this instrument as I think.

A work day Saturday - but a couple nice surprises

I had two work engagements to day. Both were quite enjoyable, but still took a significant portion of the day. The first nice thing was that my husband and younger son were with me for the second event of the day and we had lunch afterward. We haven't had a nice and slow lunch out in ages.

I came home to a pile of dishes (left from yesterday where my husband and I had a super busy day.) and learning to do with my son, and prep for Sunday and after the last few days of nonstop go I wasn't feeling to happy about all of it. Balance of work/home/homeschooling these last few days.

So, this was my mindset late this afternoon. Just then my mother in law who lives with us was heading out to meet up with some friends and she found a package in the door. I wasn't expecting anything, but it said it was for me. I opened it and I was so confused. It was two new books from Amazon.

Now I had ordered two things yesterday for my son and mother in law, but that package had already arrived. Did I accidentally order something else. Impossible because I have never even seen or heard of these books before! But they would be something I would get exactly because just a day  before I had asked about recommendations about for such books on the melnet forum. Someone had gotten it for me!?!?!

What a very pleasant surprise! I love my husband to pieces, but he doesn't get me gifts - partly because he's lousy at it and feels too pressured. As I said, I love the guy, but that is not a strong suit! I get gifts from my mother in law for Christmas, but they are never thoughtful.They are gifts for the sake of saying she gave me a gift. I really cannot remember the last time I got a thoughtful gift and definitely not one from a stranger!

I know it's a melnetter from this side of the pond as it says so on the note. Just wow! I was a recipient of a random act of kindness. Super nice. I will definitely put them to use once I learn a bit more about G row. I started on G row today too! And, when I have "got it" and mastered things with these books, I will pass it on to another beginner.

But now back to learning/practicing today. I see, though, that I'm falling into a terrible habit. I actually did the exact same thing when I was 6 years old learning piano. I remember it! The book for learning piano,( I think I learned from Miss Adeline?)  Had fingering written under the notes. I paid more attention to the fingering that I did the notes! Then one day the fingering help was gone and there I was clueless.

In this beginning method book, written in small letters is fingering guides with bellow direction guide. See below. Now, there are so many things I could be looking at instead of the fingering guides to know what to play. Things that will never go away for notation, but those fingering guides will, so why am I looking at them!

I tried to start look at the notes above or the C and G lines below, but of course, it's easier to play with the fingering guides! ACK!!! Even though I'm not trying to take the easy way out, my brain can't be quite convinced of that!

I didn't get as much practice in as I wanted today too as I said it was a working day, but I did get some in! Now off to read to my son before bed and to then watch the rest of the movie I started watching with my husband, Sven, last night.