2ND POST

Welcome back everybody!! I have been busy at work with my daughter learning this devil of a piano. I mean who invented this thing with so many buttons and letters for notes that just repeat over and over? There are even pedals like a car, but believe me, pressing them does not make it stop or go. I feel like if this were a video game, my TV would have already been smashed and the controllers would be in pieces. Anyways, this was my idea and it did feel pretty good when I did something right. We started off with opening up my daughters piano lesson book for beginners level A. I learned how to sit at the piano properly, which was very uncomfortable for me (I couldnt slouch or put my feet up) I was to sit tall, lean slightly forward, let my arms hang loosely from the shoulders and keep my feet flat on the floor. If that wasnt hard enough I had to curve my fingers as if I were holding a bubble without breaking it. Really??? I also learned that my fingers have numbers. On both hands the thumb is #1 and the pinky #5. I'm sure you can fill in the rest. Lets just say I gave the piano a few #3's during this lesson. After all the boring stuff it was time to start learning some fun stuff, the notes. We started with the white keys and my daughter taught me which keys corresponded to which note(ABCDEF or G). This sounds easy, but it is actually pretty tricky, especially since they repeat again and again. I finally got to know where the keys were and how to remember their location(using the black keys above helped me alot). So far the process was pretty time consuming and I had a hard time keeping my fingers on the right keys and remembering to read the music. I had to take a couple breaks and just "step away from the piano". After some time I did get to learn two "simple" songs. One was called "A Mellow Melody" which uses only 3 keys: A, B and C on the left hand and "A Happy Melody" which uses C, D and E on the right hand. I actually read the music book to play them, but I found after a few times I knew without looking. It took some time to play pretty smoothly and my daughter clapped a couple times so I guess I'm a natural!! Im defenitley gonna have to try and remember where the keys are for next week and also how to postion myself and my hands. Im hoping that once I sit down it will come back to me and I'll know how to play those songs again. I'd really love to know how proffessionals make this look so easy and how long it took them to get there? This is alot harder than I thought and I havent really done anything hard yet. For next week i'm hoping to spend a short time recapping this week and moving on to using more fingers and not just 3 notes. Overall I feel like my daughter's feelings weren't hurt that much when I yelled at her 7 times and she told me she was quitting. Although mine were hurt a bit when she called me names, I feel like it was a great bonding experience and we can put aside our differences and continue on to lesson 2 next week. I hope you will all be back to see my progress and my wife doesnt read this. Talk to you soon.