Does Itunes count as an instrument?
It would be helpful if I could use that. As much as I like music, I am just not talented enough to play any instruments, at least not with anyone else in the room. The closest I can come to it is when I have the house to myself, and all my neighbors within a 5 mile radius are out of town and I sit down at the piano.
I do not profess to play the piano as much as I play at it. I can get enough out to sing along to (badly) and I really do enjoy doing it, though I do not get to do it as often as I would like. What I know about the piano, I learned 23 years ago or so from my friend Kim Tribble. She was a Masters student at the University of Hawaii when I lived there. I lived dorm style with some other guys in a small 2 bedroom apartment on the side of Punchbowl cemetary, and I did not spend much time there except to shower and sleep. I spent most of my time either at work, or with Kim roaming around the island on our scooters or hanging at her apartment. We listened to lots of music, usually Reba McEntire or Sandi Patti, and she had a piano. We spent a lot of time sitting at that piano where she would play and I would attempt to sing. She was amazing (and apparently deaf).
Sometimes she would have studying to do, and I would just hang out. Eventually I wondered over to the piano and started plunking around on it. I knew some of the basics, at least what keys matched up to what letters on the music, but I was one fingered at best. One afternoon, Kim had had enough of my tinkering and making a racket while she was trying to study and she set her book down and came over to the piano and taught me some basics. 3 chords to start, C, F and G. I was enthralled! You would be very surprised how many country songs you can sort of play if you know just these three chords! I started rifling through her song books looking for songs that I could play. It was not concert quality, or even 230 am piano bar quality, but it was enough that I could get the basic background of the song out and (quietly) sing along to. Soon I added some chords to my repertoire (Bflat, D, E) and I was able to do even more! On my days off, when she was at school, she would let me come over and I would spend hours at the piano playing through anything I could find that had chords simple enough for me to fight my way through. Kim had created a monster.
After about a year, I returned from Hawaii to the mainland. Kim too had graduated and returned. We lost touch for many years, but everytime I sit down at the piano, I am reminded of her. I have owned 2 pianos since. One was an old beat up upright baby grand that I bought from the Ohio School for the Blind for $75. The other is a baby grand that we bought when we got our current farm. The former owner of the farm had it, and it was just perfectly suited for the space it was in, so we purchased it from her. It has a couple of hammers missing but that's ok, it does not really get steady work. I have a bench full of sheet music and "Fake" books and have since learned several more chords to work with. On those rare occasions I get to sit down and kill some time with it, I return to that apartment in Hawaii and wonder, how the neighbors ever survived me.
Here is one song that I can (kinda) play. Funny thing, it was actually a song that meant alot to me in Hawaii as well. Sometimes, when I got a little homesick, Kim and I would drive past the gate of Ala Moana Park after it closed, and walk out the rocks (past the homeless people, that part was a little scary) and sit and look at the ocean, while this song played in my head.
The voice at the beginning....yeah...that would be me singing along
Somewhere Out There
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