Learning Something New

For my birthday (which was in July) my spouse got me a lovely gift. It was a Roland FP-30X digital piano. I’ve wanted to get one just to have another cool thing to make music with. I started from no piano (not even childhood lessons to call back to). I signed up with Skoove (an online piano learning app) for a year’s worth of lessons.

I’ve had no problems with the Roland. It sounds good. It has a headphone jack so I don’t have to annoy others while practicing. The keys feel like the “right” weight. The keyboard is in a room that I have easy access to and I do tend to play most days (at least for a few minutes).

Skoove has been okay. Not great. But I think that there may not be a great for learning piano without a very good teacher. In any case, it’s allowed me to make a bit of progress. Skoove does focus on reading music - which is something that I’ve also never done. But it’s lessons have guided me to playing with both hands and in time.

I’ll usually do whatever the lesson is and then fiddle about with the piano just trying to get more comfortable moving about the keyboard. The lessons use songs that I’m familiar with (most of the time). You learn the keys for the bass, then the melody up higher and then combine them.

Here’s a recording of some fiddling around.